On the day after Derrick Bird shot dead 12 people in Cumbria BBC Radio 4 broadcast a play entitled Six Impossible Things. Based on the true story of a murderer, it contained the line 'I'll put a bullet in your brain'. 66 complaints were made to the network, which quickly apologised and declared it had been wrong to broadcast the play. Why did this upset people? Who were they? Could they be protesting about anything more than ironic coincidence?
This seems part of the disturbing willingness to be part of a 'community of grief' which has marked British society since the death of Diana. People seem to need to think of themselves as 'victims' of tragic events, imagining that it's just too painful in their grief-stricken state to be confronted with images of any sort of violence. I vividly remember that a day or so after Diana's death the scheduled movie, Lethal Weapon III, was replaced by the sentimental (and wonderful) film, Field of Dreams, as if watching Mel Gibson's wild staring eyes as he brandished the eponymous firearm was just too upsetting for those in a fragile state after the tragedy. Of course this sentimentality is all media-led, as the duty of the news networks and newspapers is seemingly to create a community united in outrage and grief. The BBC is the prime offender here, so at least there is another irony: that its drama wing has to play by the strange rules it enforces elsewhere.
The Strangers is a film utterly without redemption - along the lines of ‘torture porn’ movies such as the Saw series and Wolf Creek. Having endured the motiveless terrorizing and torture of a couple who just happen to be ‘home’ when a group of random attackers choose to call, we are left with no hope, not even a deeper ‘point’. The opening of the film refers to some real event which ‘inspires’ the movie, though the makers appear to be unaware what this actually was or unwilling to reveal it. More likely, they don’t care.
The opening is genuinely scary, especially when the girl knocks at the door at 4 in the morning asking for ‘Tamar’ and, when told she’s not there, says plaintively ‘Are you sure?'. When we see one of the attackers suddenly inside the house, on the margins of the frame, while the central Liv Tyler character remains oblivious, it's absolutely terrifying. But from then on the movie has nowhere to go. It seems unsure and indifferent to what the point of all this is, other than – to go by the word of the director on the accompanying DVD Extras – to provide some innovative kind of movie horror experience. But this ambition extends beyond little other than technical innovations such as constructing the house in a vast studio so that the echoes are as loud and spooky as possible.
No, if there is a point it is simply that one’s home can be easily invaded. It thus reminds me of David Hare’s comment that the message underpinning Patricia Highsmith’s fiction is that ‘once you set your mind to it, any one human being can destroy any other’. In The Strangers, when asked by the Liv Tyler character why they do this, the masked intruders reply: ‘Because you were home’. This seems to refer to the victims just happening to be in while the killers were on their random spree. But it also conveys a deeper logic, that being ‘home’, counter to all the conventional connotations of safety and security, is where you are at your most vulnerable. This message is in keeping with the general paranoid tenor of 21st century America. But it's actually something that horror films have taught us more implicitly for decades. Think of the common post-horror-film experience of having your own house transformed suddenly into a location for potential evil as you eye dark spaces nervously and rush past empty rooms on the way to the safety of bed. It's the home that is made strange.
