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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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