Have You Ever Seen Anything Like the Pool Fight in The Strangers: Prey at Night?

Ask someone who has seen 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night for their reaction, and you tend to get one of two responses: “It’s an underrated ’80s-throwback slasher, and the pool scene is an all-timer”; or, “It’s a forgettable sequel that could never live up to the first movie … but that pool scene is undeniable.”

Reviews for the long-delayed sequel to 2008’s The Strangers were mixed to negative, but even the pans frequently singled out the scene, in which terrorized teenager Luke (Lewis Pullman) tussles with the film’s slasher villain Man in the Mask (Damian Maffei) around and inside a swimming pool. The scene begins with Luke walking into the pool area and discovering that he’s locked in. As he starts to panic, multicolored neon palm trees spring to life along with overhead lights that bathe the pool in an eerie glow. Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” plays softly. There’s a crash zoom to Pin-Up Girl, another of the masked killers, running out from the shadows, but Luke gets the upper hand and stabs her to death with her own knife.

Then the Man in the Mask skulks out, dragging a heavy ax behind him. He advances on Luke, who manages to avoid his swings, until both men have fallen into the pool. They wrestle in the water, the camera following them under the surface, where the music is muffled. Luke nearly escapes, but while he’s stumbling out of the pool, Man in the Mask catches up to him and stabs him in the back. The camera pulls up above them as the killer leaves Luke floating on his back, coughing up blood and treading water with the pool darkening around him. “Nothing I can say,” Bonnie Tyler sings, “a total eclipse of the heart.”

The four-minute sequence is thrilling and operatic, the kind of instantly iconic set piece most slasher movies dream of. Pullman still hears from fans about the pool scene, even as he’s gone on to roles in higher-profile fare like Top Gun: Maverick. He likens it to something he saw frequently growing up — fans coming up to his dad, actor Bill Pullman, to tell him how much they loved his climactic speech in Independence Day.

“I was always like, ‘Does that make you feel good or bad? Does it make you feel like, Hell yeah, I really landed a scene and did something memorable, or does it make you feel like the rest of the movie is for some reason all of a sudden a moot point?’ And he was like, ‘No, if you can make a scene where somebody walks out of that theater and years later they still reference the scene, you did your job,’” Pullman recalled. “So not that this at all compares to his epic, epic, timeless speech, but I did get a moment where I was like, Okay, I’m proud to have made a mark in one way or another. And it means a lot when somebody comes up to me and they say, ‘That pool scene in The Strangers: Prey at Night is killer.’ That warms my heart.”

To find out how it all came together, I spoke to Roberts, Pullman, and Maffei about filming a scene that the director called “lightning in a bottle.”

Setting the Stage

The Strangers: Prey at Night was shot on an abandoned trailer-park lot in Kentucky — an ideal location for any number of horror films, and used to great effect in this one — but there was no pool in the area. Roberts recalled producer James Harris finding a usable pool a “fair old whack away,” though the distance the crew had to travel to get there wasn’t the only issue.

“That pool was insane,” he said. “It is so big. In the script it read like this little motel pool and that’s what I’d had in my mind … then you looked at this place, and it was enormous.”

Still, they worked with what they had. The pool needed more lighting, so the crew hauled in neon palm trees that perfectly fit the film’s ’80s aesthetic. The unwieldy size of the pool also helped Roberts lock in on a specific reference point. He recalled standing at one end of the pool and looking out to the other side in the distance, which made him think of the famous jump scare from The Exorcist III, in which the camera stays at one end of a hospital hallway until the killer emerges with a giant pair of shears, and we crash zoom in.

In Prey at Night, Roberts uses a similar trick when Pin-Up Girl runs out behind Luke. Rather than filming the action up close, he decided it should be shot from across the pool with a William Peter Blatty–inspired zoom to the killer.

That zoom “is still my favorite thing I’ve ever done,” Roberts said. “The pool was too big, but that somehow photographed incredibly, ’cause you’ve got this incredible wide with the lights coming on and the zoom crashing in — it just suddenly worked.”

Cranking the Tunes

The soaring ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” heightens not only the tension and emotional stakes of the sequence but also the dark humor that distinguishes Prey at Night from its more earnest predecessor. The film’s soundtrack helps define its ’80s feel, but Roberts revealed that early cuts used a mix of genres and artists throughout. That all changed when he was looking for a song to open the movie and stumbled on Kim Wilde’s 1981 debut single, “Kids in America.”

“I was like, God damn,” Roberts continued. “That suddenly opened up the rest of the movie for me. I was like, Okay, this is the vibe.”

With that in mind, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was a natural choice for the pool scene. While the script simply said that there should be a music cue, there was never another option for Roberts. “People were a bit amused to start with it, but I think it’s the most iconic of all the songs,” he said.

It ended up being a “battle,” however, given Prey at Night’s tight budget. Bonnie Tyler was willing to hand over the rights for a “really inexpensive” fee, but Roberts explained that artists and songwriters need to be paid the same amount, and writer Jim Steinman proposed a figure that the film’s producers balked at. With the first-choice song off the table, Roberts tried Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” and T’Pau’s “China in Your Hand,” along with several other rock ballads. None of them worked nearly as well as the original cut of the pool scene with “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

“In the end, the producers were like, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and they paid for Bonnie,” Roberts said. “It was always Bonnie.”

Getting in Fight Position

At its core, the pool scene is a showdown between Luke and Man in the Mask — one that ends more tragically than audiences might expect. (Pullman was quick to note that his character does survive, though he’s sidelined for the rest of the film.) The actors worked with stunt coordinator Cal Johnson to make the sequence look believable, since Luke had to be able to evade the Man’s ax, and both men had to fall into the pool.

“Damian and I worked really hard to try to sell that … ’cause the moment that looks dumb, then it’s not scary anymore,” Pullman said.

For his part, Maffei shared, “We knew each other so well and trusted each other, so it became second nature doing that choreography after about 15 minutes … It was pretty natural, pretty easy stuff: I swing the ax, you try not to get hit.”

Once in the pool, however, the situation became more complicated. Maffei said that they alternated with stunt doubles so that he and Pullman were never underwater at the same time, but individually, both men got fully submerged. “You get a little disoriented rolling around down there, so you kind of just hope that the camera is catching it,” Pullman said, noting that Maffei had the more difficult challenge given his costuming, which Pullman described as “300 pounds of waterlogged burlap.”

Maffei remembers his mask spinning around on his head when he was in the pool. “Everything was filled with water,” he said. “It’s a corduroy suit so my pockets were filled, and the boots were like anvils, so as soon as the boots got in there and filled up, they just wanted to bring me down to the bottom.”

That made the final beat of the fight especially difficult to pull off: Pullman had to climb out of the water and try to run out of the pool, and Maffei had to catch up to him quickly enough to grab him from behind. By that point, Pullman was moving much faster in his T-shirt, hoodie, and pants than a soaked-through Maffei. That meant Pullman was able to make it to the edge of the pool while his pursuer was still struggling to get out of the water.

“I’m like, ‘You’ve gotta slow down, man, just act like you’re moving faster,’” Maffei recalled. “Johannes is yelling and the sun’s coming up, so I’m like, I gotta catch this bastard … Eventually, I got him. It wasn’t easy. Just too fast, that kid.”

Roberts spoke highly of the “well-bonded crew” who helped pull off the complicated sequence, including the underwater fight that required a camera to go into and out of the pool repeatedly. When Luke climbs out of the water, the camera also has to pull up high above the pool. Without the budget for more advanced equipment like a Technocrane (“we had no money on this movie,” Roberts repeatedly emphasized), the director credited key grip Jeff “Fish” Fisher with attaching an underwater camera to a jib system that made all the elaborate camerawork possible.

In analyzing the success of the pool scene, Roberts offered, “I think it’s just like a perfect peak of everybody working together … But you know what, I think at its core, [it works because] Lewis and Damian are believing that shit.”

Making It Last

Watching the scene now, it’s easy to see why it has become the most common point of reference for Prey at Night fans and detractors alike. During filming, Roberts and the actors all felt the shoot had gone well, but none of them imagined the enduring fixation on that one sequence.

“I didn’t think the pool scene was going to take on a life of its own,” Maffei said. “Overall, my prediction for the movie was that it was gonna get torched critically and that, mostly, the sense would be that people absolutely hate the movie.”

After all, Prey at Night was a decade-later sequel to a beloved horror film and a massive box-office success. (The Strangers grossed over $80 million on a $9 million budget.) Maffei was largely right about the reaction, though there were certainly positive takes in 2018. Bloody Disgusting writer Patrick Bromley wrote a piece called “Why the Pool Scene in ‘The Strangers: Prey at Night’ Is an All-Time Great Horror Sequence,” in which he predicted, “Five or ten years from now when audiences have moved on and many of 2018’s horror films have been forgotten, people are still going to be talking about Prey at Night specifically for the pool scene and possibly never hearing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ the same way again.”

The first time Maffei saw the finished sequence was in a Long Island theater opening weekend when his friends dragged him into a screening.

“It was very vocal, lots of yelling … especially during the pool scene, people just shouting,” he said. “Seeing it for the first time in this movie theater with this crowd … I forgot it was me up there. I was just like, Oh wow, it’s gorgeous. It’s a beautiful movie overall, but the pool stuff is just artwork, and watching the whole thing come together, it was pretty surreal.”

In the six years since Prey at Night’s release, he said that people have become kinder about the movie. When he’s approached about it, the pool scene comes up regularly, but there are also admissions from people who either hated the film when it came out or refused to see it and have now come to appreciate it.

At the time, the movie may have suffered a bit thanks to the sudden embrace of “elevated horror” that had begun dominating the cultural conversation. As a contemporary Time Out review put it, “In the current horror climate, when movies like ‘Get Out’ and the forthcoming ‘Hereditary’ are earning praise for their adventurousness, these retro scares feel especially out of touch.” Now, Prey at Night’s throwback thrills seem precious and rare — and the pool scene in particular serves as an essential reminder that a classic slasher can also “elevate.”