The Strangers is a 2008 American psychological horror film written and directed by Bryan Bertino and starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. The film follows a couple whose stay at a vacation home is disrupted by three masked intruders who infiltrate the home in the middle of the night. The screenplay was inspired by two real-life events: the multiple-homicide Manson family Tate murders and a series of break-ins that occurred in Bertino's neighborhood as a child. Some journalists noted similarities between the film and the Keddie cabin murders that occurred in Keddie, California, in 1981, though Bertino did not cite this as a reference.
Development of The Strangers began in 2004, when Bertino submitted his screenplay for the film for a Nicholl Fellowship grant. The screenplay caught the attention of producer Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment. Bertino sold the screenplay to Universal Pictures in November 2004. Directors Justin Lin and Mark Romanek were originally attached to direct the project, but after both backed out, Bertino was hired as director. Made on a budget of $9 million, the film was shot on location in rural South Carolina in the fall of 2006.
Originally slated for a theatrical release in November 2007, it was postponed before eventually being released on May 30, 2008 by Rogue Pictures, a subsidiary of Universal. The film went on to become a sleeper hit, grossing $82 million at the box office worldwide. It received mixed reviews from critics, with some critiquing it for its sadism and sparse character development, while others praised its atmosphere, suspense, and psychological elements. The film was nominated for Best Horror Film at the 35th Saturn Awards, and Tyler won the award for Best Actress at the 3rd Scream Awards.
In the years since its release, The Strangers has become a cult film and received critical reassessment with praise for its tension and stylistic minimalism. Additionally, film scholars have interpreted it as a meditation on random crime in rural American communities, and common fears of unpredicted stranger-on-stranger violence. The film would eventually result in an eponymous franchise, first with the sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018), co-written by Bertino, and later a standalone trilogy (2024-2026) set within the same continuity, starting with The Strangers: Chapter 1, on which Bertino was also a co-writer.
Plot In February 2005, James Hoyt and Kristen McKay arrive at James' isolated childhood summer home following a friend's wedding. James is reeling after an emotional Kristen rejected his marriage proposal at the reception. James calls his friend Mike to pick him up in the morning. The couple attempts to have sex but is interrupted by a knock at the door. They find a young woman asking for someone named Tamara. James dismisses her and builds a fire for Kristen.
After James goes to buy cigarettes for Kristen, the woman from earlier returns, asking the same question. Kristen dismisses her again. A masked man is seen silently watching her from inside the house. Kristen notices the smoke detector she had dropped on the floor earlier is now sitting on a chair and realizes someone is in the house. She finds her cellphone missing and is horrified when the front door is forced ajar. The young woman, now wearing a mask, peers into the house. Kristen locks the door and retreats.
James returns and reassures Kristen that nobody is in the house. They see the young masked woman, Dollface, watching from outside. James attempts to get his cellphone from their car but finds it ransacked and its tires slashed. The couple attempts to escape in the car, but are abruptly stopped when a masked brunette woman, Pin-Up Girl, rear-ends them in a pickup truck. After the Man in the Mask begins to break through the home's front door with an axe, James and Kristen hide in a bedroom with a shotgun.
Mike arrives shortly after and James, mistaking him for an intruder, accidentally shoots him dead. Distraught, James remembers an old radio transmitter in a garage on the property. James attempts to reach the garage before the Man in the Mask knocks him unconscious. After James fails to return, Kristen flees to the garage, where she witnesses Pin-Up Girl destroy the radio. Kristen returns to the house and hides in a pantry, only to be confronted by Dollface and the Man in the Mask, who incapacitates her.
The couple awakens at dawn, tied to chairs in the living room. Kristen demands an explanation for the intruders' actions, to which Dollface replies, "Because you were home." The offenders unmask themselves before taking turns stabbing the couple. They leave and come across two young boys distributing Mormon religious tracts. The boy gives Dollface one, and right before the strangers drive away, Pin-Up Girl says, "It will be easier next time." The two boys come upon the house, where they discover the bloodied bodies of Kristen, James, and Mike. When one of the boys examines the bodies, Kristen suddenly regains consciousness before grabbing his hand and screaming.
Cast Liv Tyler as Kristen McKay Scott Speedman as James Hoyt Gemma Ward as Dollface Kip Weeks as Man in the Mask Laura Margolis as Pin-Up Girl Glenn Howerton as Mike
Themes Film scholar Kevin Wetmore noted the film's portrayal of violence as a reflection of its contemporary culture, writing: "Death is a random act in post-9/11 horror—the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the cliché goes. Unlike in eighties slasher horror, for example, where engaging in negative behavior such as drinking, doing drugs, and having premarital sex is often a forerunner to being killed by the killer(s); [here], death is random and unrelated to one's behavior."
In The Horror Show Guide: The Ultimate Frightfest of Movies, Mike Mayo noted the film's "grim realism," writing that the main characters "could have wandered out of a gloomy Ingmar Bergman film," ultimately branding the film as an example of "naturalistic domestic horror" akin to Michael Haneke's Funny Games.
The film has also been noted by scholar Philip Simpson as highlighting "the divide between the underprivileged and privileged classes," as well as for its inversion of commonly held beliefs about violence in urban areas and pastoral ethics: "The Strangers, as many horror films do ... undermines the conventional notion of rural society as a simpler, crime-free place. One might call the narrative sensibility informing The Strangers 'pastoral paranoia', in that danger lurks among the rough folk of the country rather than the suburbs and cities. Of course, it may be that provincial violence is a result of contamination, or in other words that the kind of stranger-upon-stranger violence typically associated with urban life metastasizes to the rural, a phenomenon noted by Louis Wirth."
In his book Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (2014), scholar Tony Williams notes the film's setting within a 1970s-era home as representative of an "American tradition of violence that is random and without any coherent explanation." Additionally, Williams reads the three masked assailants as metaphors for the "repressed and unresolved tensions affecting the couple inside the house."
Production Screenplay After attending the film school at the University of Texas at Austin, writer-director Bryan Bertino relocated to Los Angeles where he worked as a gaffer while writing screenplays. Bertino began developing the screenplay for the film, which at that time was titled The Faces; it was the third screenplay he had ever written.
In 2004, Bertino submitted the screenplay for a Nicholl Fellowship grant, which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards to unproduced first-time screenwriters. The screenplay reached the quarterfinals of the grant, and resulted in Bertino being signed by a talent manager who connected him with producer Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment. "I thought it was amazing," Lee said. "It was a scary-on-the-page script. We were able to get multiple studios wanting to make it." In November 2004, Universal Pictures purchased the screenplay from Bertino.
Inspiration
Bertino had a particular interest in the horror genre, noting how one can connect to an audience by scaring them, and would state in subsequent interviews that he grew up watching horror films. In particular, he stated he was significantly inspired by thriller films of the 1970s while writing the screenplay, and envisioned a film that "put the audience in the world of the victims." He also cited The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) as a stylistic influence.
According to production notes and subsequent interviews, the film was inspired by true events from Bertino's childhood: Bertino explains: "As a kid, I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere. One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it. At the door were some people asking for somebody who didn't live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors in the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses."
In interviews, Bertino stated he was "very impressed" with some of the theories circulating on the Internet about the "true events" the movie is allegedly based on, but said that his main inspiration was the true crime book Helter Skelter, which is about the Manson Family murders; some journalists speculated that the film was also inspired by the unsolved 1981 Keddie cabin murders that occurred in a small vacation community in California's Sierra Nevada. The film's premise has been compared by some film critics to the French horror film Them, released two years earlier, which also features a couple terrorized by strangers in their remote home.
Casting
When casting the two leading actors in the film, Bertino sought Liv Tyler for the role of Kristen. Thandie Newton and Charlize Theron also expressed interest in the role. Tyler, who had not worked for several years after the birth of her son, accepted the part after being impressed by the script, which she read while on a flight from Japan to Los Angeles: "I especially liked Bryan's way of saying a lot, but not saying everything. Often in movies, it's all spelled out for you, and the dialogue is very explanatory. But Bryan doesn't write like that; he writes how normal people communicate—with questions lingering. I knew it would be interesting to act that."
Tyler commented that she connected with the story because her stepfather, Todd Rundgren, had experienced a violent home invasion in which he and his pregnant girlfriend were assaulted. "I think one of them pistol whipped Todd which is horrible," she recalled. "There was nothing stolen. There was really no reason. It wasn't a crime of passion. But things like this happen a lot and often they're really random." Tyler later added that she felt the screenplay was "extremely well-written" and that Bertino's "vision was greater than most."
Canadian actor Scott Speedman was cast as James. Speedman was also impressed by the script, stating that "the audience actually gets time to breathe with the characters before things get scary as hell. That got me interested from the first pages". In a later interview, Speedman said he was "terrified" by the script despite it being a "simple story... It just had a feel to it that I knew if we could get half of what was on the page on the screen, it would land with an audience."