The Brutal Thriller That Brought Barbara Crampton Back to Horror is Your Next Prime Video Watch
Where were you when you first saw You’re Next (2011)? I’m being nosy because I personally can’t remember. What I do remember was that I saw it way before my prefrontal cortex was fully developed, and it was my introduction to Barbara Crampton.
I’m sure some of you are clutching your Re-Animator Blu-rays right now—“This girl discovered Barbara in the 2010s?!”—but what was I supposed to do back then? I was in college in the middle of nowhere, Blockbuster was all but extinct, and streaming wasn’t what it is now. Oh, someone is probably ready to comment that I should have illegally downloaded her movies. Clearly, you didn’t take the “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy PSA as seriously as I did. Yes, I was a goodie-goodie; let’s move on.
Directed by Adam Wingard, You’re Next tells the story of the Davisons, a dysfunctional family who have reunited to celebrate their parents’ anniversary. But before they can enjoy dinner, they’re attacked by a gang of killers in ghost-white animal masks. As the killers start eliminating the family in a series of increasingly brutal attacks, they discover one of the guests, an Australian college student named Erin (Sharni Vinson), has a secret. And she might not be the only one.
The kills are brutal, the tone slides gleefully between shocking and genuinely funny, and Erin is one of the most underrated modern final girls. But it’s Crampton’s performance as Aubrey, the elegant but fragile matriarch of the Davison family, that makes You’re Next worth revisiting again and again. She brings a much-needed sense of warmth and realism in an otherwise over-the-top narrative full of despicable characters (one son is a schlubby professor dating his former student, the other is, as we put in our 2011 review, over-opinionated and obnoxious, and the third is still in his angsty teen phase even though he’s well into his thirties and has a very hot goth girlfriend).
As this Letterboxd reviewer writes, “anything with…Crampton is an immediate 3-star minimum because she is just so flawless in every way.” So imagine my surprise when I discovered that You’re Next was the movie that brought Crampton back to acting after not being offered any roles for nearly eight years.
“I had hit my late 30s, and the roles had dried up for me, like they do with a lot of women,” she told Variety in 2018. “So I was going along with my life and not thinking about my career at all, and that call came out of the blue when I was on a little vacation. I read the script and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a nice movie. It seems like it’s fun.’”
And You’re Next is fun. I think of it as the perfect gateway film, a silly and stylish introduction to the home-invasion genre for those who might be too anxious to watch something as realistic or as gnarly as, say, Angst (1983) or Funny Games (1997/2007).
So if you’ve never seen You’re Next, or if it’s been over a decade since your last watch, now’s the time to watch it before it leaves Amazon Prime on September 1st. Stream it for a final girl who gets creative with kitchen appliances. Stream it if you love The Strangers (2008) or Ready or Not (2019). Stream it if you’re in the mood for some “artery-slashing mayhem.” But most of all, stream it for Crampton. Please stream it for Crampton.
You can watch You’re Next on Amazon Prime. If you love it, let me know: @ashjenexi on Instagram and X.
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