movie strangers prey at night true story

Movie strangers prey at night true story movie#

This especially works with the ritualistic nature of the killers.

They’re different, of course, but the feeling of immediate unease and the way the backstory is explained bit by bit as it goes, is largely the same. In the second, we’re meeting a family just as they’re heading out to drop their teenage daughter off at private school after one too many fuck ups. In the original, we are introduced to our main characters as they return to their rented cabin immediately after she has turned down his marriage proposal. There’s an unexpected hallmark of the Strangers features in that they both drop the audience into the middle of an already strained relationship. In fact, at the beginning, it’s almost the same movie, which is one of the things I love most about it. I think many of the strengths of The Strangers: Prey at Night lie in subverting people’s expectations from the first film. To me, that’s essentially saying “Oh, the sequel’s a slasher because they didn’t get that the original was a home invasion movie, or they didn’t understand why that worked.” Which is silly, because I think they very clearly did. Or worse, that Johannes Roberts didn’t get what made the original work.

Movie strangers prey at night true story movie#

That’s a sore spot, I think, for a lot of people, because they think by being a different type of movie it is betraying the first. The Strangers might feature masked killers, but it is not a slasher movie, whereas the sequel very much is. Sure, there’s absolutely something to be said for sequels like Friday the 13th Part 2 that refine and improve upon the original formula, but for the most part, the best sequels take a step to the left rather continuing down the same exact path, to push things in a new direction. Aliens feels like a different genre than the first, as do Exorcist III, Gremlins 2, Bride of Chucky, The Devil’s Rejects, even Hellbound: Hellraiser II. And that is always the most baffling to me because all I can think is, “Yes, that’s the point.” As many criticisms as people may have toward the movie itself, it still seems that the thing it is most often condemned for also happens to be the thing that every other great sequel is praised for. People who condemn it often point out that it feels like a different genre. It’s a different film, a different type of film, it doesn’t feel like the first. That is, without a doubt, the criticism I see lobbed at it the most, every single time the movie is brought up. In some ways, it feels like it was probably never going to be successful at the time.īut I think the main reason, above all else, that The Strangers: Prey at Night is not as celebrated as the first film is because it is an incredibly different movie. This was the sequel to a movie that was successful, fondly remembered, but nonetheless no longer part of the public consciousness.

It’s not like a 40th anniversary Halloween movie, where the franchise is immediately recognizable all over the world. The fact that it was released ten years later also no doubt made the sequel much tougher to market. There was even periodic talk right up until Prey at Night went into development that Liv Tyler would return, either in a cameo or as a returning protagonist, but that obviously did not happen. That is a long time for a movie to build up in people’s minds. Talk of a sequel began not long after the original was released, but the sequel didn’t actually come out for another ten years. 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night, however, does not have anywhere near the same kind of recognition as its predecessor. Its reputation seems to only grow stronger every year, and deservedly so, as it is one of the most unbelievably tense films of the century so far. The Strangers has become well regarded as one of the best horror movies of the 2000s.