A quiet day. I capped it by watching the 2006 horror movie Them. I didn’t know this until I started watching, but the movie is very similar to the 2008 film The Strangers, which I saw back in 2009. There was even some conjecture, the internet informs me, about whether the second film was an American remake of the first, but apparently they’re just similar. So maybe it wasn’t tonight’s movie’s fault, then, that I wasn’t really loving it. Scares and suspense are usually contingent on your not knowing where the movie is headed, and that just never felt like the case. Them is well crafted, and sometimes genuinely scary, despite that air of familiarity. But, at the end, I feel like I prefer the American not-a-remake remake. There’s a reason for that, beyond the fact that I saw The Strangers first, but it treads deep into spoilers, so be ye spoiler warned now.
Both movies are about home invasions, a couple terrorized by unseen figures. In The Strangers, however, they feel more like a force of nature, a truly frightful and unknowable force. There’s no back story, there’s no explanation. When the masked trio is asked, at the very end, by the couple, “Why are you doing this to us?” the only answer they give is, “Because you were home.” In Them, it turns out the tormentors are a pack of young boys, who treat fear and murder like a game. We see them hop aboard a bus — a school bus? — at the very end, and there’s a post-script saying that they were arrested some time after the attack. And that’s when it kind of stopped working for me, when it felt like it was maybe trying to shoehorn in some kind of social commentary about the violence of young men or something. Them is scary and put together well, but The Strangers is simply more intense; by not knowing who’s out there in the darkness, even when they come inside into the light, it ends up the scarier of the two films.