Even fifteen years later, The Strangers still has secrets that have arisen in the last few years.
The Unseen “Directors Cut” Due to the film being “underestimated”, Bryan Bertino had a lot of creative freedom when directing and editing the film. The first cut of the film, edited by Kevin Greutert, was over 100 minutes long. After the first screening with a test audience, there were parts of the film that didn’t resonate well and so edits had to be made.
Part of this edit was a result of audiences not testing well to James grabbing his father’s gun too long after being tormented by the Strangers. Audiences believed this wasn’t realistic and that if this was really happening they would’ve grabbed a gun first. As a result, they had to cut the film so that they grab the gun earlier, but this came at the cost of at least 20-25 minutes of footage in between, lowering the runtime. Multiple scenes were cut, “good and bad scenes”.
When Bryan Bertino was letting the cast know of scenes that were being cut, he told them that the studio would include his directors cut on the DVD, something which unfortunately never happened.
Repurposed Footage For the scene where Kristen grabs a drink from the kitchen and The Man in the Mask steps out from the hallway and watches her, producers had Bryan Bertino film an extra shot with a close-up of The Man walking into the house as a backup in case the scene didn’t work well. The scene worked well, and so the shot was repurposed for when Kristen is sitting in the backyard waiting for James to come back from the barn and The Man enters the house and watches her.
A Bigger Ending The ending to the film was longer, contained a lot more dialogue and we go to see a lot more of The Strangers.
The biggest points of the original ending were a build up to the unmasking and more dialogue between The Strangers and James & Kristen. The Strangers tie James and Kristen to chairs and asked them to pick a record which they put on the record player and told them they were attacking them because they were home, dialogue which was left in the film.
The reasons for The Strangers faces being removed was that the studio was interested in pursing sequels for the film. A representative was sent down to the editing room and told Bryan they had to cut out The Strangers faces so they could keep them mysterious for potential sequels. Bryan did not want to do this as the ending had been filmed with their faces being shown as the intention and there was not a lot they could do to cut around it. The studio considered re-filming the ending to make it work better but there was no time or money in the budget to do it, and so scenes had to be cut and the runtime of the ending made significantly shorter.
In the original ending, when Pin-Up Girl unmasks herself, she is revealed to be crying. This is not necessarily out of remorse, but because she knows what is coming next and she hasn’t quite come to terms with the fact that they’ll be murdering James and Kristen. Both The Man in the Mask and Pin-Up Girl struggled to kill James and Kristen, whereas Dollface had no issue and went right at it, likely being the most psychotic of the group and fitting with Kip Weeks’ theory that Dollface was the leader of the group.
Each Stranger took turns stabbing James and Kristen, and stabbed each of them three times. Pin-Up Girl at some point leaned down to James, kissed him on the head and whispered “I’m sorry”. After stabbing James and Kristen, The Strangers cleaned themselves up in the kitchen sink and then changed into James and Kristen’s clothes, which they are seen wearing at the end of the film.
They untie James and Kristen and the pair fall to the floor, lie down face to face and James dies whilst Kristen passes out. The Strangers head outside and Kristen crawls over to Mike’s phone which is ringing next to his dead body. She grabs the phone, and then The Man appears behind her as he left his mask behind. He takes the phone, compliments Kristen on a song she was singing which makes him “happy” and then leaves the house. We still got part of this scene, minus the dialogue.
Bryan Bertino intended for all of this to be released in his directors cut but this never came into fruition.
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