31 by 31 Challenge #13: THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT (2018)

Ten years after audiences were terrorized by the now infamous trio of masked Tamara-searching psychopaths in The Strangers, Dollface, the Pin-Up Girl, and the Man in the Mask return to terrorize a family of four stranded in a desolate trailer park in Johannes Roberts' (47 Meters Down) follow-up to what many consider one of the most frightening horror films of the 2000s and a sentimental favorite among genre fans.

The Strangers: Prey at Night
Released: March 9, 2018
Director: Johannes Roberts
Screenplay: Bryan Bertino & Ben Ketai

Tagline: "Let Us Prey"

Cast:
Christina Hendricks as Cindy
Martin Henderson as Mike
Bailee Madison as Kinsey
Lewis Pullman as Luke
Damian Maffei as Man in the Mask
Emma Bellomy as Dollface
Lea Enslin as Pin-Up Girl


Cindy and Mike are taking their teenaged children, Luke and Kinsey, on a visit to their aunt and uncle for one last attempt at family bonding before Kinsey is begrudgingly sent off to boarding school. When they arrive, the family discovers that the trailer park that is home to Aunt Sheryl and Uncle Marv, now in the off-season and almost entirely empty, has become the latest hunting ground for a trio of masked, murderous stalkers whose visages will be all too familiar for fans of the original slash-and-stab chiller. 

While The Strangers was a traditional home invasion movie, Prey at Night expands the hunt to an entire trailer park, but it has the interesting effect of making the new film feel more claustrophobic than the original. Certainly, this is true when the killers are terrorizing the family within the trailer itself, but it's also true when the kids are trying to hide in the playground, when the fenced-in pool becomes a literal bloodbath during a particularly tense chase scene, and when the only road out of the trailer park is turned into the ultimate death trap.

All these great hiding places mean there are constantly Strangers appearing from the shadows, barely letting the audience catch their breath between attacks. At first, the children and parents are separated, then the men and women pair off together; this allows for different layers of character development so that then when the eventual deaths hit, they hit hard. There's a great sense of dark desperation over the film, not only in the heroes attempting to survive but in the killers as well. They're relentless in their pursuit, and in that sense, the film shares a certain bleak fatalism with classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and the original Halloween (1978).

There's also, arguably, nods to another Carpenter classic, Christine (1983), in how the Strangers utilize vehicles. To them, a car is just another home to invade and so rather than a tool of escape for the victims, cars become just another weapon for the killers to terrorize them with. Prey at Night thus succeeds in bringing the scares surrounding the original film to the next level while also delivering a satisfying story with believable characters the viewer wants to root for but knows that such optimism is foolish in the masked face of random evil.


The Strangers: Prey at Night
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror