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Get a first look at The Strangers Trilogy

Published by: IsTamaraHome.net
Date Published: 5 October 2023

Lionsgate has given us our first official stills from The Strangers Trilogy through Entertainment Weekly, giving us our first look at Maya, Ryan, and two of the Strangers.

The Strangers was released in 2008 and instantly became a cult classic. Director Renny Harlin remembers his experience of seeing it too. “I remember the experience of seeing it”, Harlin said to EW. He isn’t shy to the horror genre, having directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and a sequel to The Exorcist, which is also receiving the trilogy treatment from Universal Pictures, starting this year. “I didn’t really know anything about it when I saw it and I just loved it. I thought it was fantastic and it’s stuck in my mind as one of my favorite horror films.”.

Just like us, Harlin is a fan of The Strangers, and he had the lucky opportunity to become the fan who is now the director of three consecutive films in the franchise “When this opportunity came to me, the idea of not doing a remake or a reboot but doing a trilogy based on the original film, I thought it was an incredible opportunity,” Harlin says.

The Strangers: Chapter 1 is set to come first, and will play out much like the original film — following a young couple who, after their car breaks down in Venus, Oregon during a cross country road trip, find themselves the latest victims of the three masked Strangers. Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez play Maya and Ryan, the couple in question. Will they make it to the end of Chapter 1? Are they a couple that actually like each other this time around? We’ll just have to wait and see. On the first film, Harlin states that it “is close to the original movie in its set-up of a young couple in an isolated environment in a house and a home invasion happening for random reasons.”

The Strangers: Chapter 2 and The Strangers: Chapter 3 round out the trilogy and will dig deeper into the Strangers — why are they doing what they do? Where did they come from? That will all be examined. Is it really just because they were home? There’s a story there, and Harlin explores “what happens to the victims of this kind of violence and who the perpetrators are of this kind of violence. Where are they coming from and why?”

Casting Petsch and Gutierrez was no easy task. One thing that really made the original film work was the chemistry between Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, and Harlin knew he had to find his two leads who could recreate that chemistry for a new audience. “Obviously Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman did a fantastic job in the original film and those were some big shoes to fill,” Harlin stated. “We looked long and hard for our scream queen. When I spoke with Madelaine I just knew that she was an exceptional person, exceptional actor, and that’s what it took to play this part. In the same way, after looking long and hard, we found Froy Gutierrez, who is another wonderful young actor. We wanted a couple who feel natural and relaxed together. Their relationship, maybe it’s not identical to the relationship in the original film, but it’s something that feels very natural and very real, and that to me was the key to this movie and this trilogy. It’s the realism.”

What’s a Stranger without their mask? Being a fan of the original, Harlin knew that there was no shying away from the original masks. The same effort that went to find their lead stars was put into recreating the masks of Dollface, The Man in the Mask (both pictured above), and Pin-Up Girl.

“We felt it was central to the movie that the masks are the same,” says Harlin. “The masks in The Strangers are not like the Batsuit or something that evolves over years. To us, the Strangers are the Strangers, and I, as an audience member, wanted to see them just the way they were in the original film. Is there a place where you can find these masks? No. It was a process of studying what they were like, how were they made, how they fit on the actors’ faces, how [to] create that same impression. It was one of the real challenges of the movie.”

On shooting the trilogy in Slovakia last year, Harlin had this to say:

It was “the challenge of a lifetime, but I also really embraced it. On a Monday morning, I could be shooting the second chapter, and Monday afternoon I could be shooting the first chapter, and Tuesday morning I could be shooting the third chapter. it was incredibly demanding for the actors, for the continuity in terms of the make-up and wardrobe, and for my director of photography, because we wanted to create a visual language that develops so that the movies get bigger, more epic, as we go [on]. It just kept all of our juices pumping all the time.”

The Strangers Trilogy is slashing into theatres starting in 2024. A first look is set to be shown at New York Comic Con later this month, and I’ll be providing updates as soon as they are available.

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