Finland’s foremost Hollywood hitmaker, director Renny Harlin premieres his unsettling, unnerving, and downright scary “The Strangers: Chapter 1” in theaters nationwide May 17.
Just don’t call it a remake of the 2009 horror hit “The Strangers.”
“I definitely wouldn’t have done this if I was offered the opportunity to do a remake or a sequel to ‘The Strangers,’” Harlin, 65, insisted in a Zoom interview.
“But when I was told that this was literally a reimagining of this movie, by taking the premise of it, taking the home invasion, and certain key elements of that movie — and then going much further and deeper into studying the psyche of both the victims and the perpetrators and that we will be doing it in a four-and-a-half-hour epic that will be broken up into three chapters! I felt like this is too good to be true.
“Because that’s the downside of movies compared to good TV — you never have time to really go deep into discovering all these details about the characters and really going on this larger journey with them.
“So I felt like for once we can really, really study what makes the killers tick. And what the victims go through mentally and physically.”
The premise is splendidly simple and completely unnerving. A young, attractive couple get lost on a road trip. Their car suddenly won’t start. They must spend the night in an isolated cabin in the woods where three masked figures appear, to terrorize and then murder them. There’s no reason, no explanation.
Why does this so intensely connect with an audience?
“It’s a violent world out there,” said Harlin, whose pulse-pounding hits include “Die Hard 2,” “Deep Blue Sea,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” “Cliffhanger” and currently on Netflix, “The Bricklayer.”
“They say there’s a violent crime committed in the United States every 30 seconds.
“It’s really a matter of bad luck, stumbling into a situation where something like this happens in nature. There are sociopaths out there that do senseless acts of violence just because they’re bad people and they want to hurt other people.
“I think that the message of this is that it is a dangerous world. And it could happen to any of us. But definitely, once you’ve watched all these three movies, there is also a sense of hope.
“In general, in life, I think there’s choice in every situation. In nature it’s called ‘fight or flight.’ Are you going to fight for yourself? Or are you going to succumb to what people do? In this case, I hope that our message is that, if you’re ready to fight for yourself, you will survive.”
“The Strangers – Chapter 1” opens May 17
