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The Evolution of Horror

HOME INVASION Pt 23: The Strangers (2008) & The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018)

The Evolution of Horror

Mike Muncer

Tv & Film, Film History

4.81.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2023

⏱️ 120 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

"Is Tamara there?"
This week Mike is joined by hosts of the Horror Queers podcast Joe Lipsett and Trace Thurman to discuss one of the most infamous home invasion movies of all - THE STRANGERS - and its less-talked-about 2018, PREY AT NIGHT...

Music by Jack Whitney.

Big thank you to Mary Wild for this week's 'Wild About Horror' segment! Sign up to Mary's Patreon! Follow Mary on Twitter to find out more about her upcoming courses and follow her podcast, PROJECTIONS PODCAST.

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Mike Muncer is a producer, podcaster and film journalist and can be found on TWITTER

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

What you are about to see is inspired by true events.

0:22.0

James and Kristen arrive late at night to James' isolated summer home after attending a

0:38.0

friend's wedding. Things are already pretty tense between them, following a rejected

0:42.6

marriage proposal earlier that evening. But things soon go from bad to worse, when at 4am there's

0:49.7

a loud knock at the door. A young blonde woman whose face is barely visible in the low lighting,

0:57.4

asks the couple, is Tamara here? The couple tell the woman she has the wrong house and she leaves,

1:06.7

but soon enough the blonde woman returns. And this time she's not alone.

1:20.0

Brian Batino's The Strangers followed in the footsteps of European

1:27.1

Arthouse horror movies like Funny Games and Eel, with its simple, stripped down premise and its

1:33.6

nihilistic mean-spirited tone. But unlike those films that came before it,

1:42.9

The Strangers had a distinctly mainstream sensibility, with a list star live Tyler in the

1:48.8

leading role, plus creepy masks that felt more akin to American slasher movies, and gave the film

1:56.1

an instantly iconic look. The result was a sleeper hit, a movie that slowly became hugely

2:03.7

successful through word of mouth, and is now considered the quintessential home invasion movie,

2:10.5

the one to which all other home invasion films are compared.

2:14.6

Eventually The Strangers got a sequel, prey at night, 10 years later, and then would go on to

2:22.4

have three more sequels announced, making it officially one of the biggest and most successful home

2:29.6

invasion franchises ever. Join me as we continue exploring the evolution of home invasion and

2:47.6

we peek through the curtain into Brian Batino's bleak, terrifying world of The Strangers.

3:00.2

Welcome back to The Evolution of Horror. My name is Mike Munter, and as ever I am your host.

3:06.2

In this podcast, we explore and dissect the history and the evolution of the horror genre

3:11.0

one subgenre at a time, and we are currently in the middle of our ninth season exploring

...

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