What Now

YES, I NORMALLY LIKE SCARY MOVIES

I saw a movie yesterday that scared me badly. I knew it was supposed to be a scary movie, but I didn't think it would be that bad! It was called "The Strangers." Now, if you want to watch this movie for yourself and see what happened, go away immediately! I'm going to talk about it so I'll feel better! Shoo!

OK, the story is about this young couple already having a really bad night. They were on their way home from a wedding, where the guy had proposed to his girlfriend at the reception. She said no (she wasn't ready), so understandably, they weren't happy. Their original plan was to go to his parent's - predictably isolated - summer house that night to stay and then go on a road trip the next day. Of course, telling her boyfriend she wouldn't marry him kind of changed plans for them. When they got to the house, the guy had decorated the place with candles, roses, and champagne, which didn't make either of them feel any better about what happened. Needless to say, everything was kind of sad and awkward. The guy calls his best friend and leaves a voice mail asking if he will pick him up the next day because things didn't go as planned. That's important, I swear. He goes back to the girl and while they were talking, a woman knocks on the door and asks them if "Tamera" was there. They tell her no, she had the wrong house, and she says "are you sure?" and then walks away. It was creepy, but not too weird. Inside the house things continue to be awkward, and when the girl runs out of cigarettes, the guy says he'll go and get her more and leaves her at home alone.

While he's gone, she starts hearing things. The woman who had knocked earlier comes back and knocks on the door again, and asks again if Tamera was there. The girl, already freaked out, says that she had already been there and asked that, and the woman says "are you sure?" again and then walks away. The girl calls her boyfriend and tells him that weird stuff is going on, and for him to hurry up and come home, but the phone cuts off. She keeps hearing weird things, and finally opens the curtain and sees this huge dude outside with a mask over his face. It was just a bag with eye holes cut out of it and a mouth drawn on, but it was a freakishly scary mask. She screams and hides. Her boyfriend finally comes home and she's trying to get him to understand what has been going on, but he doesn't believe her. Instead of shagging ass to the car and getting the hell out of Dodge, he tells her nothing was outside and spends valuable time trying to calm her down. When she runs to get her cell phone, it's gone. The guy goes back to his car to get his own cell and sees that his car had been destroyed. He finally believes the girl was telling the truth. It all kind of went downhill after that. The boyfriend winds up accidentally killing his best friend with a shotgun because he didn't realize the friend had felt so sorry for him that he came out there that night to get him. The three bad people (2 girls and a guy, all in masks) methodically terrorize the couple, as well as cut off all means of communication to the outside world. They wind up mentally torturing them for hours and eventually killing them, all "because they were home."

I can't say that the director didn't use some of the cheaper forms of scaring the viewer, because there were plenty of those sudden noises and misdirection that startle you. However, it was so atmospheric and, well, scary. There are scenes where it's totally quiet and the room is full of shadows, so your focused on the main actor, but eventually you realize that you see a faint silhouette or the faintest glimpse of a white mask in the shadows. They didn't use normal, scary music at all to alert you to what might happen. In fact, there isn't really any music at all in the movie except for what they show playing on an old record player in the house. The music that plays is weirdly cheerful and unsettling, because it doesn't fit what's going on. The whole movie is quiet, except for that music, with very little dialogue. The bad guys aren't supernatural, but they give off that impression because they appear and disappear so quickly, between the three of them there are only two lines that are spoken, and the masks they wear have frozen expressions that don't allow you to see them as human at all. Not to mention, you can tell they were just playing with the two people to scare them as much as possibly before they killed them, and enjoying it the whole time. I think part of what made it so scary was that it was plausible. Maybe real people would have reacted differently than the victims did, and maybe the bad guys wouldn't have been able to pull things off so smoothly, but in the realm of hard-core-crazies, you never know. The movie was probably more of a psychological thriller than a proper horror movie, but it was really, damn scary. It made getting to sleep difficult, and movies don't normally do that to me anymore.

It was scary. I watched it in daylight and it was still scary. So, there you go. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go and find a weapon to carry around with me today.