Saw the trailer for The Strangers last week when we went to see Iron Man. Usually horror movies don’t do anything for me because I grew up on a steady diet of 70s/80s slasher movies. I even took a night course on how to make horror make up and actually got to work on a Bollywood-type movie about East Indian zombies in the water reclamation plant. Or something. We didn’t get to see a script, just one day to make heads into zombies.

I digress. The trailer actually made me jump. Seriously. Okay it had the usual “WHAM! SCREAM! BOOM!” kind of structure but it did find one thing that manages to freak me out every time. The old “being watched by the creep in full sight” shot.

I find if you’re going to scare me it has to be the most cleverest of bait-and-switches (not just “open the fridge, get something, close the fridge…MONSTER behind the open door!!!”) or it has to be subtle. Theres a scene in the trailer that has the female lead standing alone in a large room, no sound. From behind, through a darkened doorway, enters a masked figure. And they just stand there, the woman unaware that someone is at the threshold of the room, staring at her. Here’s some screen grabs:

The reason this freaks me out is probably because I read waaaay too much Edward Gorey as a kid . His drawings of vacant Victorian rooms and random acts of tragedy somehow reminded me of certain rooms we had in the house growing up (see image below, from The Gashlycrumb Tinies). This trailer is the same effect, visually, as sniffing something and having a flood of memories come back to me. I was terrified of the vacant apartment we had on the top floor of the rambling old house I grew up in and I think I only went into it once, clutching my sister’s hand, cutting off the circulation.

Oh yes, I think I’ll see this one!