Abishai100
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- Sep 22, 2013
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A look at the original home-invasion dystopian masked-psycho film The Strangers (2008), which created a new franchise for modern storytelling and claustrophobia/space-jitters.
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The original film we're looking at (2008) stars Liv Tyler ('Kristen') and Scott Speedman ('James') and opens with a telling/account of an actual crime scenario unresolved and then proceeds to offer shots of a typical suburb/town and introduces us to the protagonist 'hero' victim-couple, speeding to their borrowed getaway house (James' old summer childhood house) following a wedding of a friend.
The couple eases into their house and then proceed to start detecting the presence of 'Strangers' after a mysterious girl standing in their doorway knocks on their house insisting that someone's inside their borrowed house she knows. She scurries away only to return (seemingly) with her two 'friends' (in masks), wielding weapons of murder. James/Kristen do their best to evade these Strangers and try to find sanity and safe-spaces and ultimately have to deal with the trio of Strangers (unmasked) revealing their 'agenda' the morning-after.
This gripping/graphic and well-mounted 2008 original sparked off an incredible series/franchise, with a reboot trilogy now directed by Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Nightmare on Elm Street 4). This original 2008 offers us some of the symbols/imagery representative of the other installments in this psychological gem-series about space-paranoia, home-invasion of the dystopian/graphic variety, and youth and masks and psychos and escape-consciousness (sure).
It's of an interesting note how this original, and the others following it (really) offers us an uncanny view of the design of masked psychosis, not unlike the noir-night and mask-aesthetics of the Halloween franchise, but in the Strangers, we see something new about modernism, post-Orwellian cinema, in which basic civilization 'overground' sensibilities come-undone in the face of a new Earth 'feeling' of traffic/transit/commercialism/consumerism claustrophobia or youth-angst surfacing a new form of prison-like qualia. This original is a key-note to introducing fans of dystopian lore to the handsome (if garish) franchise. B+
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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)
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The original film we're looking at (2008) stars Liv Tyler ('Kristen') and Scott Speedman ('James') and opens with a telling/account of an actual crime scenario unresolved and then proceeds to offer shots of a typical suburb/town and introduces us to the protagonist 'hero' victim-couple, speeding to their borrowed getaway house (James' old summer childhood house) following a wedding of a friend.
The couple eases into their house and then proceed to start detecting the presence of 'Strangers' after a mysterious girl standing in their doorway knocks on their house insisting that someone's inside their borrowed house she knows. She scurries away only to return (seemingly) with her two 'friends' (in masks), wielding weapons of murder. James/Kristen do their best to evade these Strangers and try to find sanity and safe-spaces and ultimately have to deal with the trio of Strangers (unmasked) revealing their 'agenda' the morning-after.
This gripping/graphic and well-mounted 2008 original sparked off an incredible series/franchise, with a reboot trilogy now directed by Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Nightmare on Elm Street 4). This original 2008 offers us some of the symbols/imagery representative of the other installments in this psychological gem-series about space-paranoia, home-invasion of the dystopian/graphic variety, and youth and masks and psychos and escape-consciousness (sure).
It's of an interesting note how this original, and the others following it (really) offers us an uncanny view of the design of masked psychosis, not unlike the noir-night and mask-aesthetics of the Halloween franchise, but in the Strangers, we see something new about modernism, post-Orwellian cinema, in which basic civilization 'overground' sensibilities come-undone in the face of a new Earth 'feeling' of traffic/transit/commercialism/consumerism claustrophobia or youth-angst surfacing a new form of prison-like qualia. This original is a key-note to introducing fans of dystopian lore to the handsome (if garish) franchise. B+
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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)
