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The Strangers

Posted on March 22, 2020

Lady in a Cage: Early, Devastating Home Invasion Film

Dawn Keetley

Lady in a Cage (1964) is a deeply disturbing film. I was, to put it bluntly, shocked that a film this dark was made in the early 1960s. It anticipates some of the more nihilistic horror films of later decades—notably Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997 and 2007), and Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers. Indeed, these films seem at times explicitly to reference the earlier film.

Luther Davis wrote the original screenplay for Lady in a Cage, and the film was directed by Walter Grauman. Aside from its unremitting bleakness, the film is also notable for its stars: Olivia de Havilland plays Mrs. Hilyard, the eponymous “lady in a cage,” and one of the invaders of her home, Randall Simpson O’Connell, is played by a young James Caan in his first substantial role in a feature film.

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Posted on April 18, 2019

8 Vacation Home Horrors: Summertime Madness

Guest Post

Jordan Peele’s recent film Us (2019) cashes in on what horror does best: it takes a comfortable setting and makes it very, very uncomfortable. In Peele’s movie, that setting is a Santa Cruz-area summer home owned by the Wilson family. What begins as a relaxing getaway ends in a bloody showdown between the Wilsons and a murderous foursome that looks creepily similar to them. Like these doppelgangers, the physical spaces of vacation—the house, the nearby lake, the beach boardwalk—become, over the course of the film, decidedly uncanny.[i] The lush verdure of the house’s front yard becomes a menacing jungle in which the intruders easily conceal themselves; the once-placid lake becomes a watery grave; instead of a cozy glow, the den’s fireplace casts a hellish backlight behind the grinning doubles. Read more

Posted on June 8, 2018

Us and Them and the Rise of Political Horror

Dawn Keetley

Us and Them, a British film that saw general release in the US in March, 2018, is the feature-film directorial debut of Joe Martin, who also wrote the screenplay. It follows three working-class men, Danny (Jack Roth), Tommy (Andrew Tiernan), and Sean (Daniel Kendrick), who decide to invade the home of a wealthy family—patriarch Conrad (Tim Bentinck), wife Margaret (Carolyn Backhouse), and daughter Phillipa (Sophie Colquhoun)—for, as it turns out, very different reasons. The trio is lured into crime both by a political rage that is tied to a contemporary moment of widening class inequality and by money, a motive for crime as old as money itself.

Danny is the voice of political resentment and rage. He argues that the time has come for the working classes to take “direct political action” by targeting the top 1% who, he tells us more than once, own as much as the bottom 50% in the UK. “Things have to change,” he says, trying to urge his friends, in a long speech he gives them in the local pub, to see Conrad, a financier, as a “political target.” Danny’s plan, not exactly meticulously thought-out, is to terrorize the wealthy family, forcing Conrad to choose which of his wife or daughter will play Danny’s seemingly deadly game of roulette. His intent is to videotape the “game” and then broadcast it along with his political statement. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as Danny intended. Neither his victims nor his partners in crime acquiesce in his agenda.

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Posted on November 25, 2016

Bertino’s The Strangers Evokes an Archaic Malevolence

Dawn Keetley

I have recently been exploring a sub-genre of horror that used to terrify me—the home invasion film. I created a list of some of my favorites so far (most of them on the milder side as far as violence and sadism goes), and I heard from a lot of people about other films I should watch. One that came highly recommended was The Strangers, a 2008 film directed by Bryan Bertino. I want to say thank you to those who recommended the film, because it is indeed exceptional. Read more

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