As the first teenager in the neighborhood with contractual permission to
rent R-rated videos, is it any wonder that Bryan Bertino grew up to be a
horror film director?
By Telly Davidson, FilmStew.com
In Bryan Bertino's new horror film The Strangers can be found
respectful cinematic "quotes" and overt homages to
Halloween, The Toolbox Murders, The Amityville Horror,
Deep Red, Eraserhead, Black Christmas and Friday the
13th. But unlike the Scream era postmodern classics, The
Strangers is anything but goofy or spoofy, with Bertino staying true to
old-school slasher-style flicks.
"I think that for me, it wasn't so much a wink and a nod at the old
slashers as it was just that those were the films that I grew up with,"
Bertino explains during a recent one-on-one interview with FilmStew.
"I was very lucky in that my dad, probably earlier than any of the other
kids dads' I knew, signed the consent form so that I could rent R-rated
movies."
"I was the kid that showed everybody Halloween the first time,"
the now 30-year-old Texas native recalls with a smile. "I was the one that
rented The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was still in junior high
school."
Along with the byproducts of slasherdom's 1978 to 1981 heyday, Bertino
also cites paranoiac precedent-setters like The Conversation and
Three Days of the Condor as personal favorites, along with disaster
movies and films from the golden age of blaxploitation. "When it came down
to the kinds of films I wanted to do, I always came back to those '70s genre
stories," he says. "It was just that those that were the movies I knew and
loved, more than say Hostel or Saw. Although the guy that
edited The Strangers, Kevin Greutert, is actually the one who did the
Saw movies."
Still, Bertino has been getting heat from critics for The
Strangers' ultra-violent and shockingly open-ended finale. "I knew
it was a criticism I'd have to face, but if giving someone just any old
reason or motive [for the murderers] was going to please critics, I knew it
wasn't going to please me," he notes. "If you say that the killers
did this because of something the victims did ten years ago, or because they
were rich, or because they were beaten as children, or whatever, then the
audience can just reassure themselves, 'Well, I'm not rich... I as an
audience member had never done this-or-that.... so I don't have anything to
worry about.'"
Bertino remembers being mesmerized while reading accounts of the Charles
Manson atrocities and says that when it was time for his home invasion
story, he wanted to tell it strictly from the horrified victims' point of
view, giving audiences only the information that the victims of The
Strangers have. "When you wake up in the middle of the night and a
guy is staring over you with a knife, you're not wondering what his
motivation is. You just want to get him the hell out of there, or kill him
yourself."
A week before Bertino sold his Strangers script in 2004, he was
still without a literary agent or manager. But by placing in the top 400 of
scripts for the Nicholls Fellowship, both that and his bottom line finances
soon changed.
"It was kind of a two-year process of Film School, Part II - taking
meetings, making pitches, studio politics - all the things they don't
teach you in film school," Bertino remembers. "I write slightly
differently now than I did before, with more of a director's eye. As to my
goals on the next project, I think that all of my scripts are things I care
about. There are projects that are very close to me, that I'm really
excited about announcing."
At press time, The Strangers has grossed $52.2 million
domestically.
In Theaters 
