The truly remarkable thing about watching Aja’s take on the material is just how much is identical – at least on paper – to the original. High Tension’s Alexandre Aja made his stateside debut with this deeply unwell remake of a well-remembered (but not particularly well-made) Wes Craven movie about a nuclear family that’s stranded in the desert and beset by a murderous clan of inbred mutants.
The perfect stranger movie 2006 full#
A gripping psycho-thriller centered around a pair of gutting performances from an increasingly deranged Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, it predicted the kinds of intellectual arthouse takes on the genre that would become more in vogue a full decade later and genuinely feels like Friedkin stumbled upon some heretofore unknown paranoid thriller from thirty years ago and unleashed it onto a modern audience completely unprepared for what they were getting themselves into. While I genuinely can’t get enough for underrated gems like Cruising (1980) and Killer Joe (2011), what is doubtless his best post- Exorcist chiller is this paranoid throwback about an otherwise level-headed woman increasingly wrapped up in the fearful delusions of a stranger who unexpectedly blows into her life one night. The culture was primed and ready to scream, and 2006 stands as one of the barnburner years for the genre in recent memory.Īlthough little regarded for his more recent films, legendary New Hollywood director William Friedkin (of The French Connection and Exorcist fame) has worked steadily since his 1970s heyday and his output has remained as unnervingly effective as ever. By 2006, Europe was at the height of its grisly primal scream, the United States’ collective id had coalesced into a desperate backlash against the horrors brought on by September 11 and a lot of deeply talented (and, in some cases, deeply disturbed) filmmakers were playing with the form in ways that hadn’t been seen in a generation. While there were some admittedly lean years at the start of the century for quality horror movies, those thankfully cleared up by midway through its first decade.
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