Is Tamara there? Are you sure? “The Strangers”

The Strangers is really, really freakin’ scary. If you take nothing else away from this post, know that The Strangers is really, really freakin’ scary. I can’t emphasize that enough. Really scary. You will sleep with the lights on after seeing it. I slept with my gun under the pillow and my back-up piece next to the bed (good thing the stray cat didn’t knock over her bowl in the middle of the night or I’d’ve shot up the whole compound). Because The Strangers is really, really freakin’ scary.

Okay, so are we clear on that point? Have I appropriately Vince Lombardi-ed it into your skull? Good. Because The Strangers is a really, really effective film. Fear, like humor, is a subjective thing but I consider myself kind of an acid test of scary movies. At some point in my development my analytical side went haywire and developed the ability to siphon away most of the effects of the standard movie horror fare. Axe-murders? Yawn. Freaky, psychedelic psychological horror? Go back to MTV. Big, scary monsters? Not really effective since Alien.

No such thinking in The Strangers. More often than not I was thinking Goddamn, this is scary…what was that noise? Will I get in trouble for firing into the darkness? The movie’s setup is simplicity itself. A young couple (Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler—unfortunately, not wearing her glasses) return from a wedding to his parent’s vacation home, where, late in the night, they are menaced by a trio of, er, strangers. Writer/director Bryan Bertino doesn’t use the familiar setup out of laziness, but instead to make the movie as economical as possible. For what he has in store, he really doesn’t need a complicated setup.

Things are not good between our protagonists, Jim and Kristen. As we find out, he proposed to her at the wedding and she didn’t exactly respond with a joyous ”yes.” There’s a palpable sadness as they go through the uncomfortable ritual of a couple that has just acknowledged the rift between them. Bertino perfectly nails the way small, intimate gestures grow cold, such as when Jim unzips Kristen’s dress without any sense of urgency or eroticism.

And then there’s a knock on the door and things get unsettling real fast. “Is Tamara there?” a mysterious woman asks. “Are you sure?” Already Bertino is tightening the screws. It’s unsettling enough to have someone pounding at the door at 4AM. It’s worse when you can’t make sense of why they’re there. From here, the tension slowly, inexorably increases.

First, there are the subtle things—a missing cell phone, a second inquiry about Tamara. When Jim briefly leaves to pick up cigarettes, things start to get seriously scary. Kristen, alone in the house with a dead cell phone must contend with repeated and increasingly ominous probes of the house. Then the stalkers with the masks show up. Of course the idea of killers in masks is nothing new, but Bertino gets credit for finding the creepiest masks available. Two women wear Harlequin masks. The lone male wears a suit and a scarecrow-like white mask. The sheer incongruity of them, the generic blankness, and the stillness exhibited by the intruders all just keep pressing the audience’s “This is seriously screwed up” button.

Bertino keeps the mayhem to minimum in these early scenes, instead wringing terror out of wide-frame shots showing the intruders standing in the darkened background as Jim or Kristen try frantically to gain some control of their situation. Soon their mounting terror becomes both cause and effect, as when Jim’s attempt to defend their rapidly-violated house with a shotgun yields unexpected and tragic results. For the first two-thirds of the movie the intruders do nothing more than harass the terrified couple and expose their vulnerability to wear them down.

The final third of the film has Jim and Kristen fighting a losing battle of wits against the intruders who toy with them the way a cat plays with a mouse. Bertino still resists the urge to turn the movie into an incoherent violence extravaganza, dangling hopes and avenues of escape before our increasingly-less-than-intrepid protagonists only to have the silent, malevolent attackers close them down one by one.

The ending is a bit of a let down, if only because there’s no real resolution that could have satisfactorily explained the nature and intent of the intruders. What can be said for it is that Bertino remains true to the movie’s uncompromising trajectory.

The movie hits mostly all the right notes. Along with Bertino’s masterful use of stillness and silence (there’s virtually no soundtrack), he further destabilizes the audience by establishing Jim as something less than a competent masculine archetype (he deals with Kristen’s rejection by digging into a tub of ice cream—as Indiana Jones has shown us, the appropriate way to drown your sorrows is with rotgut and firearms) and by establishing the home as highly permeable and affording only the most illusory sense of safety.

There are, of course, implausibilities. The intruders pull of some fairly complicated mind-games in record time (as when they scrawl “hello” all over the walls of a room in seemingly minutes), and it’s unclear why there are no neighbors, traffic, or even dogs on this block.

Still, Bertino gets enough right to make The Strangers really, really scary. This is the movie Rob Zombie wanted his remake of Halloween to be, because Bertino’s smart enough to take a page from John Carpenter’s book rather than drench his movie in self-conscious ‘70s references.

So, I should reiterate: The Strangers is really, really scary