Renny Harlin directed The Strangers: Chapter 1, which is the first part of the three-chapter saga. The movie is currently playing in theaters and this interview will contain major spoilers.
After their car breaks down in an eerie small town, a young couple (Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez) are forced to spend the night in a remote cabin. Panic ensues as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive in THE STRANGERS ― CHAPTER 1, the chilling first entry of this upcoming horror feature film series.
“The whole premise of this four and a half hour epic reimagining of The Stranger‘s story was the idea that we take the original movie, the premise of a young couple in a house that is getting home invaded and we see this completely senseless, horrible, horrible attack unfold, and we say, ‘What if one of them survives? What would happen the next day?’ So that’s basically the premise. The first movie takes us to that point of what’s gonna happen the next day? And then, the next movie starts from there. So instead of the usual structure of sequels come some years later and different characters, different stories, different locations, the whole three movies take place in the same town. Not in the same house, but in the same town. In the second movie, you can just expect us to expand the world, still keeping it claustrophobic, still keeping it very real but now it’s this young woman trying to basically survive and get out of Dodge. That doesn’t go so well and then the second movie ends when she really has to make some hard decisions of… it’s fight or flight,” he explained, previewing what comes next in the trilogy. “It’s like, are you going to fight for your life or are you going to just run? And we’ll get some answers to that in the third movie.”
I asked him about the ending, what fans can expect from the next two chapters, and crafting the story’s biggest change from the original 2008 film.
Watch my interview below:
