In horror, bodies are usually split into parts, not the movies themselves.
Lots of slasher icons are revived for sequel upon sequel over the years (just look at Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees) but very few franchises — in any genre — have released a trilogy of movies within one year. Lionsgate‘s “The Strangers” is breaking down the door in an ambitious, three-chapter strategy to give horror fans a never-before-seen horror “odyssey.”
This isn’t the first time “The Strangers” has come sneaking into theaters. The original 2008 film, inspired by real-life break-ins and the Charles Manson murders, starred Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a not-so-happy couple who get an unwelcome knock at their door in the middle of the night. They turn away a creepy woman asking “Is Tamara home?” but are soon plagued by masked, knife-wielding home invaders. The movie became a sleeper hit, making $82 million off a $9 million budget, and 10 years it later spawned a sequel, “The Strangers: Prey at Night,” with a different cast.
Now, billed as an “homage” to the original, “The Strangers: Chapter 1” promises to follow up with not one but two sequels in quick succession over the next several months. It arrives in theaters May 17.
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Once producer Courtney Solomon, a fan of the 2008 movie, acquired the rights to “The Strangers,” he knew he had a much larger story to tell, but he didn’t want to do a remake.
“In order to tell it you’re gonna need to go back to the great original,” he says. “It’s the primal nature of the original concept, these three random people and unexplained, random acts of violence, which is just so terrifying and real. I don’t know if you can improve upon that, so why don’t we take that basic premise as a starting point and modify it for a bigger story that becomes proper, character-driven horror. You need to spend time with both protagonists and antagonists, so I went off and came up with what ended up being a 285-page script.”
That massive script transformed into three movies that Lionsgate will release in a span of nine to 12 months. The multi-part film strategy isn’t new, but such a quick turnaround is almost unheard of. In 2003, “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions” were released within six months of each other; horror director Ti West released “X” and “Pearl” half a year apart in 2022; and in Sweden, three movies based on Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” novels (beginning with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) all released within 2009. This summer, Kevin Costner is dropping the first two chapters of his western epic “Horizon” within two months of each other, and Zack Snyder wrapped up his sci-fi duology “Rebel Moon” four months after “Part One.”
“In terms of how audiences are consuming content, the thing that was interesting was you can make three movies at once and deliver them in a quick manner. A lot of people don’t have to wait,” says Geobert Abboud, Lionsgate’s executive vice president of global distribution. “We’re not necessarily trying to make theatrical a bingeing media, but the idea was to release a film that we were confident was going to work theatrically, as well as number two and three that can follow up pretty quickly with another experience versus waiting a year or two years to get that sequel.”
That ambitious rollout resulted in a 52-day shoot in the Slovakian wilderness under the deft hand of veteran director Renny Harlin. No stranger to horror, Harlin has helmed installments of “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “The Exorcist” plus action thrillers like “Die Hard 2” and “Cliffhanger” over his 40-year career. He shot the “Strangers” trilogy interchangeably, starting with the opening of “Chapter 2,” then a scene from “Chapter 3” and so on. Though there aren’t premiere dates yet for the two sequels, he estimates they’ll be released in “September or October” and then wrap up in “the beginning of next year.”
“If it had been a straight remake or a sequel, I wouldn’t have done it at this point of my life,” he says. “I have such respect for the original film and am somewhat intimidated by the quality of it. Simply doing a sequel or remake didn’t appeal to me, but this was such an opportunity to have four and a half hours of a case study of victims of a violent crime and the perpetrators and what makes them tick and how it affects a person who goes through this.”
Madelaine Petsch, in her first major role since “Riverdale” ended, managed to fit the shoot between filming the ending of her CW drama. She plays Maya, who is the latest to get the “Strangers” welcome party with her boyfriend Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) in a remote Airbnb in Oregon. Even though “Chapter 1” follows the traditional “Strangers” home invasion, she teases that the next two movies put Maya through all-new trauma.
“Throughout every step of the next two films it’s just, ‘How is she going to get out of this terrorizing situation?'” she says. “And it’s not necessarily all only home invasion, but they continue to invade her life in any way possible. Even in ways you don’t think are possible, they’re doing something fucked up. We really bend the rules a lot, which is fun.”
One reveal in the sequels is that “Strangers” fans will finally learn who Tamara is, whom the killers always ask for when they knock on the front door in the middle of the night.
“We wanted to take the audience on a journey,” Harlin says. “The movies get more epic as we go but without losing the sense of claustrophobia, dread and the tone, which is reality. As a filmmaker, your instinct when you’re doing an action movie is that bigger is better. In this one, my job was to rein myself in and always make sure that it’s real. Many times, smaller was actually better. The most important thing is that the movies keep the sense of reality, but where we take the audience in the second and third movie is going to be very surprising.”
And for fans who want the four-and-a-half-hour director’s cut, there’s a very real chance it could happen once the trilogy finishes. Abboud confirms there is “some version of that we’ve discussed at a high level that we’d like to see at some point.”
Harlin adds, “It’s in our heads. This is definitely what we want to do. We want to cut together the full arc. We know exactly how to do it, then we’ll create a movie and see who are those diehard fans who will come to the movie theater for four and a half hours. I don’t know if we need to have an intermission so people can get some food and go to the bathroom, but I definitely want to have that event and see if people take four and a half hours of dread and fear and terror and despair.”
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