The Strangers: Creepy Trailer and Background

The Strangers is set to drop at the end of May. It stars Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman and was written and directed by Bryan Bertino. Since cutting a movie promo is an art unto itself I know I should by cynical, but this one brought me up short. I heard the final lines spoken on the trailer, where Liv Tyler’s character asks someone why they’re “doing this to us,” and a woman’s voice answers, “Because you were home,” and I wanted to hope. I wanted to believe that someone could finally bring back the psycho thriller in an original and genuinely scary way. Here is the trailer, more information after the jump.

[SDYT]x1TBlPelvbE[/SDYT]

---

The Strangers is supposedly based on real events. I don’t believe for one minute that Bertino rounded up news clippings and police reports and did a ‘ripped from the headlines’ bit. Hell no. The “real events” thing is actually disingenuous bullshit when any movie trots it out, even last year’s Zodiac, which portrayed events surrounding a real series of murders in the late 1960s as seen through the eyes of political cartoonist-turned-author Robert Graysmith, who wrote two books about Z and modestly put himself front-and-center in both stories as the guy who really knew who Zodiac was all along. Sure dude, whatever you say.

But if Bertino was inspired by some real stories, these are worth noting.

Based on Web chatter about Strangers – including the Wikipedia entry on the movie — at least two mass/spree murders have been suggested as influences: The Manson Murders and The Keddie Murders.

Strangers has three masked people confronting lovers Kristen McKay (Tyler) and James Hoyt (Speedman) at a remote vacation house after the couple heads there following a friend’s wedding reception. Two of the masked intruders are female, the third a male in a suit and tie.

Echoes of Manson, alright. Most of the killers who romped through the homes of a movie star and then a grocery story executive at Charlie Manson’s behest in August, 1969 were female. Manson had brainwashed vulnerable young hippies he met on the streets of San Francisco and later L.A., providing them with a father figure, an apocalyptic vision and a liberal supply of weed and LSD.

Manson’s psychopathic male follower Tex Watson would direct the festivities (Charlie was only at one crime scene briefly). Manson family victims were confronted by earthy hippie chicks bearing buck knives and a gun-wielding Watson. Some details of what Charlie’s kids did to their victims are here if you want them.

A blog entry will never communicate the sheer scale of Manson Family creepiness. One tidbit may help; before they began killing for real-real, Manson followers did some play-play, going on practice runs they called “creepy-crawlies.” They would break in and roam a house while the family was sleeping inside. The challenge for the would-be killers was simple — that the victims of the creepy-crawls never know what happened.

Just knowing the bastards did it at all has always been enough to make me peek under bed or check the closets at random intervals throughout the night.

Seeing the Keddie Murders mentioned as possible inspiration for The Strangers was a little puzzling. No one really knows to this day just what the hell happened in Cabin 28 at the Keddie Resort on April 11, 1981. We do know that it was probably as close as the real world ever gets to the most gruesome slasher movies imaginable.

Sue Sharp, son John Sharp and his friend Dana Wingate were murdered that night 27 years ago. All three were bound, bludgeoned, and stabbed to death. The room where most of it happened was flooded with blood. There were slashes on the walls. Furniture was busted. The victims were beaten with fists, as well. And in a back room three little boys slept through it all, unharmed. But Sue Sharp’s daughter Tina was missing.

Someone found her head buried near a waterfall 50 miles from the Keddie Resort in 1984.

The Keddie Murders took place in a remote, peaceful location. They tainted the Resort where they occurred. Cabin 28 became a magnet for weirdos, ghost hunters, kids just wanting to scare themselves and webmasters who knew an interesting chance for sightseeing when they saw one.

There were persons-of-interest in the Keddie murders, even a possible motive — a drug deal gone bad. Had the suspects quickly been brought to justice and the motive confirmed, the massacre never would have dug into the psyche of anyone who heard about it. But to this day, no one is sure about what happened. So the blood-soaked mystery lingers. It’s sparked documentaries and probably other movies as well, whether the movie makers acknowledge it or not.

If The Strangers comes close to generating the kind of terror and dread that these kinds of real-life horrors induce, it will be a helluva movie. There’s no guarantee — Funny Games came out in March here in the U.S., and it had a similar plot — monstrous strangers against innocents at an idyllic retreat. Funny Games failed in America and was loathed by many critics.

I have hope for this movie because of the way the cinematic ghost story got a shot in the arm from movies like Blair Witch, Sixth Sense and The Ring. The random psycho genre has never left us, but aside from the mask, there appears already to be a world of difference between mute, hockey-masked, hulking, superhuman psycho Michael Myers and the creepy masked trio seen in footage from The Strangers. The psychos have begun to speak, and it might be spookier that way.

“Because you were home.”