After surviving a terrible attack, a young woman must endure a night of excruciating torment at the hands of the killers who murdered her fiancé and want her dead. Bloody torment and flesh-rending evil abounds.
She was supposed to have died.
Everyone in the small town of Venus, Oregon, had expected that outcome. A young woman and her fiancé had been set upon by three masked strangers and hacked apart in terrible ways.
However, when word dribbled out that the woman, named Maya, had somehow survived, people began sitting up with a strange look on their faces. No one spoke about it, or how many others had also died at those masked killer’s hands. And generally, if you simply kept your mouth shut and eyes closed, you wouldn’t join the number of deceased.
The masked assailants, Scarecrow, Pin-Up Girl and Doll Face, could be anyone in town. Even Sheriff Rotter knew that. Hey, for all the townsfolk knew, the sheriff might be one of them.
Everyone also knew the killers’ routine.
They’d come pounding on someone’s door late at night. They’d innocently ask if “Tamara” was home. And then they’d burst in, axe swinging and knives slashing, to do their murderous deeds.
Why? Well, why does there have to be a why? It just was.
Only this time, someone survived.
For her part, Maya is laid up at the hospital. She’s covered in stiches and bandages and is as wounded on the inside as out. Memories of that pointlessly horrendous night play over and over in her head. She can’t help seeing Ryan’s beautiful face as he lay on the ground near her: blood in his mouth, fear in his eyes. It requires a strong sedative for her to finally slip into a fitful sleep.
But then a terrible dream jolts her back awake in the dead of night. And she gets a call on her cellphone. She sits up, expecting her sister’s voice. But it’s someone else.
Is Tamara there? a stranger’s voice asks.
There isn’t much to point to in this film’s positive column. Someone reaches out to aid the terrorized Maya as she runs. (But that person gets butchered for her efforts. In fact, anyone who even glances in Maya’s direction ends up dead.)
You might say that Maya’s resilient spirit is the lone beacon of hope in the film’s 90-minute run time. She is relentlessly tortured, but grits her way through every torment.
On several occasions, we hear a radio preacher delivering a sermon that’s seemingly about Jesus and hell. We only hear snippets of what he’s saying, but one short segment declares, “Jesus said, ‘I am the way. I am the only way.’”
An adult talks about getting a tattoo during a “Christian retreat” as a kid. “You know how teens are: sex, booze and cheap tattoos,” he notes.
After crawling to someone’s doorway, covered in wounds and oozing gore, Maya is taken in. She awakens in bed dressed only in her underwear. As she crawls out of bed and looks in a full-length mirror, the camera likewise takes time to examine her bruised and gashed body.
The Strangers: Chapter 2 leans into its bloody violence, hard.
It’s kept just offscreen, but a young girl batters another girl with a hefty rock, killing her. Then she sits down with a friend and draws in the pool of the dead girls seeping blood. The two children smile and hold hands, smeared and spattered with gore. We also watch as a girl snaps a small mouse’s neck.
We see people shot in the face and torso with hunting arrows. Victims get tied up and slashed, and blood gushes down their chest from open wounds on their faces, throats and upper bodies. A man is suffocated with a plastic bag. Blood is smeared across walls, floors and windows. Some corpses are left lying in pools of blood. A large animal is stabbed and gutted.
The Scarecrow mask guy hacks at several people with a large axe. We hear the crack and crunch of him pulling the large weapon back out of victims’ torsos. The two female killers stab viciously at fallen victims with large kitchen knives. Someone’s legs get skewered by a pitchfork’s shafts. Another individual drives a pair of scissors into someone’s shoulder and another person’s temple.
Of course, the battering-and-beating focus is generally on Maya. She is smashed with large objects; chased and chomped on by a large roaring animal; stabbed, slashed and ripped. Maya is in a near constant state of bloodiness, with gashes on her forehead, cheek and neck. Someone grabs a fistful of her hair and rips it out by the roots.
At one point it appears that Maya’s torn-open ankle might be broken. She rips off a large bandage soaked in blood and we watch closely as she stitches up her own gushing wounds—gripping a stick in her teeth to stop from screaming in the process. She is brutally choked with a strap before crashing a speeding vehicle to escape. Etc.
There are 10 f-words and a half-dozen s-words in the dialogue, they are joined by a few uses each of “b–ch” and “h—.” God’s name is misused once or twice. A crude reference is made to the male anatomy.
Maya is given a sedative and pain medication while in the hospital. A guy swigs repeatedly from an open booze bottle, becoming obviously drunk in the process. Another person drinks a beer.
The film notes that “in 2023, over 1670 people were murdered by strangers.” That declaration seemingly emphasizes the randomness of all that violence. When interviewed by the town’s sheriff and deputy, Maya notes that the killers enjoyed their brutality, like a ritual. And we see several flashbacks that give us insight into the masked killers’ childhoods. These vignettes portray when that ritualistic enjoyment of death began.
We see Maya struggling through a number of foul situations, including dragging her torn and nearly incapacitated leg, crawling through filth and gulping from a muddy stream.
As its title might suggest, The Strangers: Chapter 2 is the second entry in a planned trilogy of horror pics. So, it assumes that it’s viewers already know what’s going on and plays its entire story out as a one-dimensional second act in a gruesome three-act play.
The film hits the ground running—or rather, abused protagonist Maya jumps out of a hospital bed and proceeds to run for her life—for the next hour and a half.
Maya is battered, torn, strangled, mangled, stabbed … and battered some more. The camera leers at her ripped-open stitches, her bruise-covered body, her teary-eyed terror, her dripping gore. In fact, it’s only actress Madelaine Petsch’s well-acted and palpable dread that gives viewers anything to watch and potentially invest in at all here.
Most horror films come with at least some small message or symbolic meaning stitched into their gashed-open innards—perhaps some spiritual insight or societal examination. But The Strangers franchise has none of that. It simply reminds us that scores and scores of innocents are randomly murdered each year at the hands of complete strangers.
With that focus, this film plays out as a genuflection to mentally twisted evil in its purest form.
In light of similar virulence in our daily media feeds, buying a ticket for this dreck feels pointless. Even for horror fans.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
