The Strangers: The Culmination of the ‘Depraved’ Family in Slasher Films and the Reformation of the Nuclear Family for the Twenty-First Century

Mothers are famed within horror cinema. From Norma Bates and Mrs. Voorhees to Wendy Torrance and Margaret White, mothers dominate the cultural conversation around family in horror. They are the puppet masters behind the scenes and the legacies left to their children; they abuse, love, and sometimes kill, in equal measure across horror’s canon. This dominant position of the ‘mother’ within the first families of horror is often a reflection of her cultural capital at the time the film was made.
Families have been framed in vastly different terms in both literature and media since the women’s liberation movements and adjoining civil rights movements of the 1960’s, “with an emphasis on dysfunctionality within the American nuclear family.” With that change has come new paradigms through which to view the role and responsibilities of motherhood (Arnold 46). This dysfunction has mutated with the coming of the neo-slasher and its destabilisation of traditional gender roles. The roles of ‘mother’, ‘father’, and of the family unit has developed in some, though not all sections of society to become less conservative, with a greater value placed on women’s emancipation from their duties as a mother.
Here, I will argue that The Strangers (Bryan Bertino 2008) reflects horror’s involvement in this debate, drawing primarily from the work of two scholars, Philip Simpson and Kimberly Jackson. First, the relationship between Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) will be examined to show how it embodies an anti-conservative view of the family—and how this serves as the principal factor in their lack of resilience against the trio of strangers that descends upon them. Kristen and James’s relationship will then be contrasted with that of the invading trio in order to illustrate horror’s proclivity for assembling a de facto nuclear family around its villains, and how The Strangers’ trio represents contemporary culture’s interpretation of family and family dynamics at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.