The Shaky-Cam is Already Inside the House!

This weekend, I had the opportunity to watch The Strangers.  I remembered seeing the trailers when it first came out and thinking it looked pretty creepy.  It struck me as something that could really give me a good scare.  Realistic horror always scares me more than anything supernatural; Cujo scared me more than any number of zombie movies. Overall, I thought The Strangers was pretty well done, with one really glaring exception.  From the very beginning, the director of photography eschewed the use of any kind of tripod or camera mount.  I can only imagine the director thought he was making some kind of edgy decision to make the scenes scarier or more suspenseful by shaking the camera like it was a camcorder the whole time.  That can, and has been, very effective in small doses.  When the whole movie is like that, it destroys any kind of immersion in the film, and a good horror movie absolutely relies on such immersion to terrify the viewer.  Instead, too many otherwise genuinely creepy and suspenseful moments get reduced to cheap jump scares.

The camerawork improved a fair amount in the middle third of the movie, and many of the shots were truly inspired, with the strangers themselves fading in from and back out into the darkness.  Lighting and sound also played a crucial role in setting up the high tension through the film.  And once we got past some of the confusing and, in my opinion unnecessary, jump cuts at the beginning trying to set up the backstory, things got interesting. I don't want to give too much away, as recent as this movie is, but I really appreciated the way they didn't try to explain everything away or give any reasoning beyond my favorite "just plain crazy" for anything that was going on.  Real boogeymen are plenty terrifying, no need to give them all manner of reasons why they became the way they are.  That, combined with a very satisfying set of scary circumstances, could have made for a fantastic horror movie, the kind that would have sent me home with nightmares.

In the end, I'm going to give The Strangers a negative 0.2 Bolls.  It had huge potential, bit the shaky-cam work really sabotaged nearly everything the film tried to accomplish in the first and third acts.  I do recommend it, but be forewarned of that. Oh, and if at all possible, wait to do any googling to find out what true events inspired the story until after you've seen it.  There was a twist there I found pretty interesting.

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