the m0vie blog

Strangers: Prey At Night is the story of a wholesome family that find themselves menaced by a group of Kim-Wilde-and-Bonnie-Tyler-loving, smiley-face-making, Nirvana-quoting nihilist hipster dirtbags. So, it’s a true horror story.

Strangers: Prey At Night is perhaps the flip side of the nostalgic-for-the-experience-of-horror-cinema movies like A Quiet Place or Lights Out, in that it’s just a straight-up nostalgic ode to all manner of forgettable eighties era slasher movies. It’s a canny example of the horror genre’s ability to cannibalise what works, a film very consciously built on the successful nostalgic retro horror vibe that made The Conjuring and The Conjuring II such massive hits, but applying it to the direct-to-video masked-and-axe-wielding-killer subgenre.

Let us prey.

Being honest, it is a surprise that it took so long to see that approach applied to the reliable low-budget slasher genre. After all, the twenty-first century has seen a host of remakes and reboots of classic hack-and-slash films like The Last House on the Left or The Hills Have Eyes, but those films consciously emphasised applying modern movie-making techniques to older material. Strangers: Prey at Night does the inverse, applying an older aesthetic to a sequel to a newer breed of horror film.

The approach is intriguing, even if the results are unsatisfying.

The horror franchise that burns twice as bright…

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