Audience reaction to The Strangers: Chapter 1 inspired Renny Harlin to add more info on the villains into the sequels

Director Renny Harlin shot an entire trilogy of Strangers movies at the same time, and while there was a point when it looked like Lionsgate might be releasing all three of the movies within 2024, that idea was clearly pushed aside. The Strangers: Chapter 1 (read our review HERE) reached theatres back in May of 2024, and The Strangers: Chapter 2 won’t be reaching theatres until September 26, 2025. A teaser trailer for Chapter 2 dropped online eight months ago, with the full trailer (embedded above) following a couple of weeks ago. This film was promoted with a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con last Thursday – and during that panel, Harlin revealed that the audience reaction to Chapter 1 inspired him to go back for some additional photography on the sequels (he didn’t want to call them reshoots) to drop in some more information about the villains.

Madelaine Petsch (Riverdale) has the lead role in this trilogy and is joined in the cast of the films by Froy Gutierrez (Cruel Summer), Rachel Shenton (All Creatures Great and Small), Gabriel Basso (Hillbilly Elegy), and Ema Horvath (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power). The Strangers: Chapter 1 centers on Petsch’s character as she drives cross-country with her longtime boyfriend (Gutierrez) to begin a new life in the Pacific Northwest. When their car breaks down in Venus, Oregon, they’re forced to spend the night in a secluded Airbnb, where they are terrorized from dusk till dawn by three masked strangers. Lionsgate plans from there to expanding the story in new and unexpected ways with its sequels. Now, we’re on to the next chapter.

The new Strangers trilogy was filmed in Slovakia. Courtney Solomon produced them with Mark Canton, Christopher Milburn, Gary Raskin, Charlie Dombeck, and Alastair Birlingham. Andrei Boncea, Dorothy Canton, and Roy Lee serve as executive producers. Rafaella Biscayn, Frame Film SK, Johanna Harlin, Juan Garcia Peredo, and Alberto Burgueno are co-producing. The first film earned an R rating for “horror violence, language and brief drug use.”

Harlin has said The Strangers: Chapter 1 “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.” Then Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 “explore 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?“

During the Comic-Con panel, Harlin said (with thanks to our friends at Bloody Disgusting for the transcription), “The first movie came out, and we got a lot of feedback from the fans and regular moviegoers. We realized that, while we had crafted this four-and-a-half hour movie that we had broken into three chapters, there was definitely room for learning from the audience experience and listening to the fact that the audience was interested in some things that we were not exploring enough yet. One of those is the fact that people wanted to know more about the Strangers. We are not saying what their names are and where they live and if they like lasagna. But we are showing some glimpses of their history in the movie, which I think deepens those characters, makes them more interesting — but doesn’t take anything away from the fact that these are real people, they could be anywhere around us, and the killings are totally random. To be able to go back and explore those things that you couldn’t do before and have a little more time with your actors and the visuals that you want to create and the kind of scares you realize really work well and so on, it’s an incredible privilege for a director. I don’t call it reshoots at all, ’cause that’s not what it was about. It was about adding and enhancing the experience.“

It has always sounded like this trilogy intended to give more information about the Strangers than the previous two films had, so it’s interesting to hear that Harlin felt that element of them was lacking before this additional photography. I’m not one of the audience members who wants to know information about those characters, so it’s at least nice to know that the films won’t be giving away their names or anything like that.

What do you think of more information on the Strangers being added into Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 in response to the audience reactions to The Strangers: Chapter 1? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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