Bryan Bertino
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The film’s next big set piece, the home invasion by the doppelgängers, is equally masterful, playing on the same fears of intrusion as “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), “The Evil Dead” (1981), “Scream” (1996), “Funny Games” (1997), “The Others” (2001), “The Strangers” (2008) and “The Purge” (2013).
A 25-minute "Twilight Zone" episode couldn't include the character development and elaborate horror set pieces as a movie four times its length, so Peele also employs an expansive repertoire of references to other horror classics, particularly "The Strangers."
Their initial entrance into the Wilsons’ lives echoes home-invasion thrillers like The Strangers , and the later stalking sequences resemble It Follows in their particular combination of lurking, inevitable terror, and abrupt violence.
Starting off evocative of other terrifying home invasion narratives such as The Strangers and The Invitation, Peele’s second film, like Get Out, reveals its machinations originate in a landscape located somewhere between the realms of science fiction and fantasy.
As if Get Out wasn’t proof enough, in Us Peele shows off his horror vocabulary, referencing everything from The Strangers to The Twilight Zone —in fact , Us gives a really solid taste of what Peele can do with his Twilight Zone reboot—and he puts together some really tense sequences set to chef’s-kiss-level musical cues.
To call “Us” a movie about home invasion would be to oversimplify things, and gratefully, Peele’s effort is not a Santa Cruz echo of 2008’s “The Strangers,” which felt like an exercise in sadism.
The downside is that Bertino relies too heavily on occasionally nonsensical terror tricks that every horror buff has seen a million times since John Carpenter's "Halloween" set the standard for domestic fright-night mayhem.
Beyond Them, debuting director Bertino has done his homework, riffing on home invasion classics Straw Dogs and Funny Games, borrowing jumps from Halloween and Night of the Living Dead, and lifting the “based on a true story” tag and sombre opening narration from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Filmmaker Bryan Bertino seems determined to evoke John Carpenter’s “Halloween” with this riff on a Mansonesque home invasion, and he hands himself some powerful visual tools by placing unsettling masks on the killers and playing with shadowy composition.
Bertino also remains subtle with his superb use of framing and backgrounds, reminding of 1978's " Halloween " in the way shots are handsomely composed to suggest that danger could be lurking around every corner.
There's an ax through the door, as in "The Shining," and a hideaway in a louvered closet, as per "Halloween."
The baddies carrying out their siege on the heroes’ house wear creepy masks and tend to pop up in unexpected places, which brings to mind 2008’s The Strangers, another home-invasion thriller that was far scarier, less self-important and had the courage of its convictions.
Home Alone crosses paths with The Strangers and, of all things, Gareth Evans’ The Raid in writer-director James DeMonaco’s The Purge, a despicable, ugly and valueless exercise in hate, that purges all potential out of its interesting, original concept.
These neighbors wear scary masks just like the ones donned by the twisted homicidal home invaders in 2008's "The Strangers."
It doesn’t help that the film appears to be lifting heavily from Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers.
Five years ago, Bryan Bertino's The Strangers opened one weekend earlier to reap healthy returns, and DeMonaco tips his hat to that predecessor by having his psychopaths also don spooky masks as they come-a-calling on their middle-class suburban prey.
Unlike 2008's superior, unsparingly disturbing " The Strangers ," which "The Purge" resembles quite a bit, there is a tendency to rely on a series of close calls and people being in the right place at the right time.
It covers the same bloody ground as Peckinpah�s superior "Straw Dogs" (71) and Haneke's more effective unpleasant psychological thriller "Funny Games" (97), capturing only the nihilistic trappings of the latter but failing to bring together a compelling story that holds up to scrutiny when the sun rises and we see how vacuous this sociopathic killing spree plays out.
Debut feature from writer/director Bryan Bertino is clearly influenced by everything from The Desperate Hours, The Shining and Straw Dogs to the more recent Funny Games and Vacancy.
It's not nearly as gruesome or upsetting as Haneke's movie and it has almost none of the agonizing suspense of the genre's classics ("Straw Dogs," "The Desperate Hours").
Beyond Them, debuting director Bertino has done his homework, riffing on home invasion classics Straw Dogs and Funny Games, borrowing jumps from Halloween and Night of the Living Dead, and lifting the “based on a true story” tag and sombre opening narration from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Similar premises were played out to more disturbing effect in films such as Straw Dogs and the recent The Devil's Rejects; and in more dated but effective fashion in The Desperate Hours (the 1955 William Wyler-Humphrey Bogart version).
It deals with big themes of family and grief and religion (or lack thereof); rather than the typical photogenic starlet, its heroine is a complicated woman in her 40s; and it traffics in ambiguity, opting to leave the mechanics of its central haunting nebulous and shifting (there are also a couple of images which seem to owe more than a little to Hereditary).
Building on the more schematic anguish of Ari Aster’s Hereditary , where the annihilation of the characters was so choreographed they were framed as playthings in a dollhouse, Bertino’s vision of grief is that it is a force that will destroy you if you let it — or even if you fight back.
Laid up in bed connected to tubes with healthcare workers circling him, he resembles someone who’s suffering from cancer or succumbing to dementia—a suggestion that connects The Dark and the Wicked to other recent horror movies that have utilized supernatural flourishes to examine familial death and diminishment, including Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Natalie Erika James’s Relic .
That is unfortunate, not only because Marin Ireland and Michael Abbott Jr. turn in strong, fierce performances, but because the film’s supernatural dread might have escalated even more had it been tied to the characters’ own psyches, which we see in superior horror films like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2016), and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018).
There have been comparisons to Ari Aster’s 2018 Hereditary, and it’s easy to see why, but Bryan Bertino has created a frightening film that is capable of standing out on its own.
Similar to Colin Stetson’s work on 2018’s Hereditary — or even Mark Korven’s melange of sounds for 2015’s The Witch — Schraeder floods so much of the terrain here with compositions that feel culled from the roots of Hades.
If, like Bertino, you make “inspired by true events” the centerpiece of your marketing campaign and, like Bertino’s, your story is actually “inspired by a movie we’ve seen before” (2006’s “Them”) and “inspired by a decades-old, exhaustively documented killing spree” (the Manson Family murders), you could be setting yourself up for a bit of backlash.
Instead of the usual remake of an Asian J-Horror hit, it’s very similar to the considerably more intelligent and disturbing 2006 French sensation “Ils” ( also known as “Them”) and Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” both 1997 and 2007 versions.
Beyond Them, debuting director Bertino has done his homework, riffing on home invasion classics Straw Dogs and Funny Games, borrowing jumps from Halloween and Night of the Living Dead, and lifting the “based on a true story” tag and sombre opening narration from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
In fact, the opening of the movie, which seems to emulate the narration at the start of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, gives everything away.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero
influenced The Strangers (2008)
Visuals
Beyond Them, debuting director Bertino has done his homework, riffing on home invasion classics Straw Dogs and Funny Games, borrowing jumps from Halloween and Night of the Living Dead, and lifting the “based on a true story” tag and sombre opening narration from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Debut feature from writer/director Bryan Bertino is clearly influenced by everything from The Desperate Hours, The Shining and Straw Dogs to the more recent Funny Games and Vacancy.
It's not nearly as gruesome or upsetting as Haneke's movie and it has almost none of the agonizing suspense of the genre's classics ("Straw Dogs," "The Desperate Hours").
Similar premises were played out to more disturbing effect in films such as Straw Dogs and the recent The Devil's Rejects; and in more dated but effective fashion in The Desperate Hours (the 1955 William Wyler-Humphrey Bogart version).
There are some great character actors along for the ride, with Macon Blair (writer-director of the modern classic I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, streamable right now on Netflix) and Glenn Howerton (The Strangers, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) bringing the exact right amount of unctuousness as needed.
Richard (Glenn Howerton, "The Strangers") makes ridiculous demands of a private plane’s flight attendant (Hannah Alline) before her eyes go wide, a man in a plaid flannel shirt stumbling into the cabin frothing at the mouth.
There is a whole sub-genre of thrillers and horror films about home invasions, from Michael Haneke?'s punitive Funny Games to Bryan Bertino?'s sleazy but haunting The Strangers.
From You’re Next and The Strangers to the recent favorite Hush and the classic Wait Until Dark, the set-up is usually the same: a few unwitting victims are set upon by some wildly unwelcome guests, and the fun is in seeing how the average person responds to an irrationally violent presence.
Drawing on genre favourites such as Wait until Dark and The Strangers, Alvarez keeps the terrifying twists and nasty surprises escalating, playing cleverly on sightlessness and hitting every wrenching suspense cue with a thrilling deft assurance.
In films like 2002’s Panic Room, 2008’s The Strangers, and this year’s Hush (another riff on the Wait Until Dark trope in which the invaded heroine is blind or deaf), the houses are posh mazes of sleek modern design.
The problem is, there's nothing all that obnoxious about Tyler, notwithstanding her performance in Bertolucci's "Stealing Beauty."
The pacing, the decor, the LPs on the endlessly running old turntable (cliché alert), and especially the spooky nature of the home invasion, all belong to an era when Stephen King and Brian De Palma ruled and movies such as Carrie, The Omen, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jaws defined the horror genre.
First-time writer-director Bryan Bertino is a talent to watch, and he shares Roman Polanski's knack (in "Knife in the Water," "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby") for mixing sadness and dread in opening scenes that skillfully set the tone for escalating terror.
There have been great movies about home invasion, like " In Cold Blood ," that made more of it than gruesome "events."
Some of the most iconic villains in cinema are the ones with no backstory, and that's what makes them so terrifying; we know nothing about them: Michael Myers, Heath Ledger's Joker, the killers in The Strangers , One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 's Nurse Ratched.
By contrast, The Ritual is a masterpiece of pacing, as Bruckner continually lingers on the landscape just long enough for something to almost disclose itself, with the first real appearance of the creature occurring so subtly and quietly that you could easily miss it the first time round, not unlike the first appearance of the strangers in The Strangers.
What follows is essentially Cujo by way of The Strangers: a claustrophobic siege film where casual brutality is second nature.
After seeing James Wan and Leigh Whannell's "Insidious," they went back to the drawing board, regrouped their cast and brought in some of their filmmaking friends to explore the home invasion subgenre of horror, which was Bryan Bertino's "The Strangers."
Written by Simon Barrett and directed by Adam Wingard, who previously collaborated on the serial killer drama A Horrible Way to Die (2010) and a segment of the omnibus film V/H/S (2012), among others, You’re Next doesn’t quite live up to the best entries in the genre, including Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) and Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers (2008).
Debut feature from writer/director Bryan Bertino is clearly influenced by everything from The Desperate Hours, The Shining and Straw Dogs to the more recent Funny Games and Vacancy.
There's an ax through the door, as in "The Shining," and a hideaway in a louvered closet, as per "Halloween."