The film has also been noted by scholar Philip Simpson as highlighting " the divide between the underprivileged and privileged classes , " as well as for its inversion of commonly-held beliefs about violence in urban areas and pastoral ethics : " '' The Strangers '' , as many horror films do ... undermines the conventional notion of rural society as a simpler , crime-free place . One might call the narrative sensibility informing '' The Strangers '' ' pastoral paranoia ' , in that danger lurks among the rough folk of the country rather than the suburbs and cities . Of course , it may be that provincial violence is a result of contamination , or in other words that the kind of stranger-upon-stranger violence typically associated with urban life metastasizes to the rural , a phenomenon noted by Louis Wirth . " In his book '' Hearths of Darkness : The Family in the American Horror Film '' ( 2014 ) , scholar Tony Williams notes the film 's setting within a 1970s-era home as representative of an " American tradition of violence that is random and without any coherent explanation . " Additionally , Williams reads the three masked assailants as metaphors for the " repressed and unresolved tensions affecting the couple inside the house . " Writer-director Bryan Bertino wrote the screenplay which was originally titled '' The Faces '' ; it was the third screenplay he had ever written . Bertino had a particular interest in the horror genre , noting how one can connect to an audience by scaring them , and would state in subsequent interviews that he grew up watching horror films . In particular , he stated he was significantly inspired by thriller films of the 1970s while writing the screenplay , and envisioned a film that " put the audience in the world of the victims . " According to production notes and subsequent interviews , the film was inspired by true events from Bertino 's childhood : Bertino explains : In interviews , Bertino stated he was " very impressed " with some of the theories circulating on the Internet about the " true events " the movie is allegedly based on , but said that his main inspiration was the true crime book '' Helter Skelter '' , which is about the Manson Family murders ; some journalists speculated that the film was also inspired by the unsolved Keddie Cabin Murders of 1981 that occurred in a small vacation community in California 's Sierra Nevada . The film 's premise has been compared by some film critics to the French horror film '' Them '' , released two years earlier , which also features a couple terrorized by strangers in their remote home
Manson Family murders
Tate murders
The Strangers (2008 film)