This article contains spoilers for four films, most of which are new releases. Read at your own risk.

Kat and I spent this summer living and working in Middletown, so, naturally, we decided to make the most of Metro Movies 12 on Main Street. We watched seven movies together—five of which we saw in theaters—and they were all pretty fascinating (for better or worse). We had A LOT to say about all seven so this crosstalk is split into two parts. Read what we had to say about the first four movies below, and come back next Monday for part 2. Enjoy!

“The Strangers: Prey at Night” (2018)

Sulan Bailey: Let’s talk about all the movies that we saw this summer when we were living together as roommates. We took quite the journey with our movie-watching experiences. We got a cross section of genres and quality levels and I’m really excited to talk about them.

Kat Struhar: Certainly. As someone who’s never seen a movie before this summer, my mind was blown at multiple points, both in positive and negative ways.

SB: Let’s start with “The Strangers: Prey at Night.” This movie came out in 2018. It is a movie that follows the 2008 feature “The Strangers.”.

KS: Sulan and I [spent] much of  this summer trying to decipher what “The Strangers” cinematic universe is. There are three movies in “The Strangers” franchise out currently, but they’ve each come out roughly 10 years apart. Only the first two are related. The third one is a prequel, but also a remake of the first movie. There are two more Strangers movies coming out. If you are struggling to follow, that’s because it’s very confusing.

Should we do a rose, a thorn, and a buffalo?

SB: To clarify for our readers, a rose is something we liked about it. A thorn is something we didn’t like about it. A buffalo is just something weird. 

KS: So, what’s something we liked about The Strangers: Prey at Night?

SB: I really enjoyed Bailee Madison in that movie.

KS: I love that child actress. She has been working since she was two.

SB: She’s been in so many things and she’s an icon of my childhood. In this movie, she’s a real scream queen. Something that I think is really lacking in horror movies today is scream queens. 

KS: The other thing that I really liked about “The Strangers: Prey At Night” is how quickly we get into the violence. The plot is established within the first 10 minutes, and then after that it’s just murders. It just got straight down to business.

SB: My thorn for this movie is that the names of the serial killers are so stupid. You and I literally could not remember them. Anytime a killer was on screen, we’d call them Girl Boy, Doll Girl, Tall Man, Doll Face, Ballerina Girl.

It felt like [the names] had no connection to each of the killers as characters. The killers are really differentiated visually, but their names are so stupid that you just mix all three of them up.

KS: My thorn is that I still have no idea who Tamara is. We have a full movie, a sequel. a remake of the first movie, and two more movies on the way. And I still have no idea who the strangers are, how they’re related to each other, how they met, why they kill. Who’s Tamara? What’s going on with that?

SB: For context, all of the movies start with the family or the couple or whoever is staying in some remote place, then some random woman comes up to the door, and she goes, “Is Tamara home?” But no one knows who Tamara is.

KS: I wish that some of the movie time had been used to establish who the strangers are. I’m curious about their backstory.

My buffalo is the title, because there is no reason for it to be called “The Strangers: Prey at Night.” The only reason is that the movie takes place primarily at night. But so do a lot of horror movies.

SB: My buffalo for this movie was that pool scene. In the middle of the movie, the brother and sister are running away [from the killers] and they find this motel. There’s this big fight scene between Tall Man and the brother that goes on for a long time. That was the part of the movie where I found myself really hooked and engaged and wanting to see what happened next. It almost was cognitive dissonance for me between the weird campy elements of the rest of the movie and that one really good scene. Whoever directed the movie really put all of their creative energy into that one scene, and then just kind of winged it for the rest of the time.

“The Strangers: Chapter 1” (2024)

KS: Next up is “The Strangers: Chapter 1.”  Let’s start with the rose.

SB: I’m not gonna lie, this is a hard one. There is very little to like about this movie. It’s generally void of any personality as a movie. It doesn’t have any strong technical elements but it’s also void of any of the fun campy elements that make “bad” horror movies really enjoyable. 

KS: Agreed. My rose is the scene where Madelaine Petsch’s character (Maya) smokes weed then sees one of the strangers in the house [where she and her boyfriend are staying]. Then her boyfriend comes home and gaslights her, [saying that she was]  having visual hallucinations and thought that a painting of a clown was a person. That is my favorite scene. I think it’s really crazy because does weed cause you to have visual hallucinations?

SB: I think the jury’s out on that. I’ve never heard of that happening. My rose also has to do with that scene because she starts smoking weed after she’s already had some creepy things happen at the house. I feel like being intoxicated would just freak me out way more. But that was her choice, and I respect her.

KS: My thorn is that I absolutely hated the town that it took place in. A huge portion of the movie is just the couple interacting with people from the town [where their car broke down] and people from the town being very off-putting and seemingly conservative and religious. It seemed like they were purposefully trying to come across as scary, but they have nothing to do with the strangers. At least, nothing that was made clear to us. 

SB: I think that’s a good point. I want to elaborate that the movie starts with the premise that someone else went missing and was presumably killed by the strangers in this town.

KS: It implied that the people in the town are covering up the murders somehow.

SB: Yeah. It definitely seems like the townspeople have to do with the fact that the couple’s car broke down. My thorn is the lead actor [Froy Gutierrez] in this movie. He’s so bad. He’s so boring. He’s maybe one of the most boring people I’ve ever watched in a movie. His reactions to the things happening around him are so bland and lifeless that he actively made the movie hard to watch. I hated him. 

KS: I agree. He’s a bad actor. Let’s move on to our buffalo for the “Strangers: Chapter 1.”

SB: My buffalo for this movie is the way that it demonstrates that the town is very conservative. The movie starts with [the couple] going into this random diner just to get a meal during a long road trip. Maya starts to order and tells the waitress that she’s vegan. Everyone in the diner has a huge problem with that. It was clear that the townspeople being anti-veganism was connected to them being conservative as a town, but it just wasn’t clear why it mattered.

KS: They were looking for victims for the strangers and they decided that being vegan is crime enough.

My buffalo is this movie’s relationship to Airbnb. It’s pretty clear that [the couple is] staying in an Airbnb. Why does an Airbnb exist in this town where they are so anti-vegan? I think that Airbnb is too advanced of a technology for a town that is so conservative as to be strongly anti-vegan.

“Inside Out 2” (2024)

KS: I loved this movie. I was fighting back tears [the whole time].

SB: It was very emotional. “Inside Out” (2015) was definitely more explicitly sad, but the second one is very emotional. I think it does a strong job of showing how quickly emotions are changing in that pre-teen stage. I remember feeling like that.

KS: My rose of this movie is the scene where Riley has a panic attack. Do you remember when “Puss In Boots: The Last Wish” (2022) came out and everyone was like,“This is the best depiction of a panic attack in media?” I disagree. I think it’s “Inside Out 2” when Riley has a panic attack. 

SB: My rose in this movie is Ayo Edebiri in the role of Envy. Envy is such a cute little character and everything she said was so relatable. It is just a great performance. Ayo Edebiri is a very talented actress and I had a lot of fun watching her in this role.

My thorn of this movie is the way the core memory system was expanded and how they’d go down the little elevator to place the memory into the water. I understand why they needed to explain how core memories go from being something you experienced to informing your belief system, but it just felt like there were too many moving parts to it.

KS: It also is not really explained as to why Joy’s the only one that does it before Anxiety gets there. Who put Joy in charge? Sometimes Joy isn’t in charge.

SB: That was a big point of the first movie. 

KS: My thorn for the movie is the fact that it’s never explicitly stated that all of those hockey girls are lesbians. I just felt like the sapphic undertones were so strong. 

My buffalo is Riley’s deepest, darkest secrets. I loved every single character that came out of that vault. I think that the relationship between Anger and that little fanny pack was perfect and I’m so happy for them.

SB: My buffalo for this movie is definitely how much the character Anxiety looks like Maya Hawke in real life. I just find it really funny that the character design is so similar to her general vibe.

KS: I have a bonus Buffalo. People online have pointed out that Riley’s mom’s emotions are all women and Riley’s dad’s emotions are all men, but Riley’s emotions are both men and women. What does this say about Riley?

SB: I have no idea if that’s intentional, and if it is, what does it mean?

KS: Much to explore in Inside Out 3 when Riley comes out as nonbinary.

“Longlegs” (2024)

SB: My rose of this movie is the main character’s relationship with her very religious mother. There’s a phone call that they have where her mother says, and I quote, “Are you still saying your prayers at night? They protect you from the devil.”

KS: Which is something both of our mothers would say.

SB: Yeah, for sure. That conversation just really resonated with me.

KS: It resonated so much that we didn’t even think that it could potentially be foreshadowing.

My rose is when Nicholas Cage started singing. Every time he started singing, I lost my mind. I get that it was supposed to be really unsettling, but can you imagine if you were a five-year-old girl and an old man walked up to you and started singing? You would be like, “Wow, that dude’s crazy.” And then move on with your life.

SB: I know it was supposed to be really unsettling, but mostly it was just really funny. We were laughing throughout that movie and I don’t think it was intended to be funny at all. 

KS: The most obvious thorn is how the movie just tries to do everything. It starts out as a crime [thriller], which I love. I didn’t really care that the main character was kind of psychic. She can be kind of psychic and the story can still be good. But then it became about the devil, and about those dolls, and it was just way too much going on. The movie really lost focus.

SB: Absolutely. I also think that her being psychic escalates into this “chosen one” trope where her personal life is really connected to the murders that are happening. The movie plays around a lot with the fact that she has a direct connection to Longlegs. 

My thorn for this movie is something that applies to a lot of movies. The cardinal sin of any piece of media is being trite, in my opinion. I hate when a movie or a TV show does something that is really overused and then tries to pretend that it’s really innovative and cool. This happened a couple times in this movie.

Nicholas Cage is my buffalo in this movie. He’s a weird casting choice. Anyone could have done the role of Longlegs because it’s pretty much just being off-putting and singing really loudly. But they chose Nicholas Cage and he agreed to do it. I don’t really see what specific value he brought to the film and I also don’t see what specific value the film brought to his filmography.

KS: Also, we should talk about how this movie is so strongly inspired by “Silence of the Lambs.” There’s a young female FBI agent who’s just getting started, but she has this weird ability to communicate with this older man serial killer. And that older man is really into crafting.

SB: A strong crafting element to both films. Which does make “Longlegs” seem like a worse version of “Silence of the Lambs.” 

KS: My buffalo is Kiernan Shipka because I didn’t realize it was her until we left the theater and I looked it up. I thought that it was just a woman that looked a lot like her. She’s also only on screen for five minutes. Then she kills herself. I really enjoyed the fact that she’s really famous and in this movie she was on screen for five minutes. I don’t know why they brought her on just to die.

SB: My bonus rose is a minor character in the film, the girl who cashes Nicholas Cage out at the corner store. She’s so mean to him and I love that. 

KS: She’s like, “Dad, the weird man’s here again.” I love her resilience.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Sulan Bailey can be reached at sabailey@wesleyan.edu

Kat Struhar can be reached at kstruhar@wesleyan.edu