The Most Underrated Horror Movie Sequel of all Time is Now Free to Stream, and it’s Brutal
Let’s be clear about something up front: The Strangers is great. Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home invasion classic about a troubled couple whose lives are upended by three masked killers remains a deeply ominous, chilling, relentless horror experience. It doesn’t need me to defend it.
The Strangers: Prey at Night, though, is a different story.
Released a decade after the original film, co-written by Bertino and directed by 47 Meters Down‘s Johannes Roberts, Prey at Night offers a bigger sandbox, a slight tonal shift, and even more elaborate horror setpieces, but it’s never quite gotten the love or the lasting legacy of its older sibling. That’s a shame, because it’s genuinely one of the best horror sequels of the last decade, and now it’s streaming free on Tubi, so you have no excuse to hold back on diving in.
While the original film is a more intimate affair, taking place in and around a single secluded house, Prey at Night transfers the action to a more-or-less deserted trailer park, where Cindy (Christina Hendricks), her husband Mike (Martin Henderson), and their kids Luke (Lewis Pullman) and Kelsey (Bailee Madison) have just arrived to visit Cindy’s aunt. What they don’t know, of course, is that the Strangers of the title—The Man in the Mask, Pin-Up Girl, and Dollface—have already arrived, killed the residents, and set themselves up for another killing spree.
It’s a setup that promises a higher body count than the previous film, and while Prey at Night definitely makes good on that promise, it’s what it does with its suspense, more than its actual gore, that works wonders. The trailer park setting allows Roberts to play with a lot of different ways in which the Strangers and their would-be victims can clash, and while Bertino’s film thrives on the oppressive darkness and loneliness of that house in the woods, Prey at Night becomes a brighter, more vivid world, a devil’s playground complete with a neon-lit swimming pool and vehicles ready to smash against each other.
So, aside from the bigger world and shifting visual color palette, what makes Prey at Night such a great sequel? Because it earnestly takes on the premise of The Strangers, the central fear that someone could torture and kill you simply because they thought it would be fun, and then evolves it. How would these meticulous thrill-killers behave if they truly lost control of the situation? What drives them? How far will they go to avoid loose ends? Prey at Night tackles all of these ideas while still leaving many of the central mysteries that made The Strangers so eerie alive and well. It’s a tight 85 minutes of pure mayhem, and a great horror movie for a summer night, maybe while you’re on vacation, in a place you don’t recognize, with a pool nearby…
The Strangers: Prey at Night is on Tubi now.
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