I realize it’s tedious to complain about remakes. Often tied to the weary lament that “Hollywood is out of new ideas,” such complaints are so constant that they are practically a metronome, keeping the time as studios churn out remakes or “reimaginings.” Already this year we’ve seen Mean Girls, Road House, and The Fall Guy, and still ahead are The Crow, Twisters, Speak No Evil, and Nosferatu. And now comes The Strangers: Chapter 1, which is not a prequel but a relaunch of the home-invasion horror franchise that began in 2008 with writer/director Bryan Bertino’s original thriller The Strangers.
Renny Harlin, who in the ’90s directed a slew of splashy action movies including the Sylvester Stallone-fronted Cliffhanger and the underrated Geena Davis pirate epic Cutthroat Island, is at the helm of this new chapter of the proposed new trilogy. But to call it “new” feels more than generous. Penned by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, The Strangers: Chapter 1 has some differences from the original. For instance, rather than an arguing couple staying in a remote vacation house owned by a family member, this installment follows an otherwise happy couple (Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez) that unexpectedly finds shelter in a last-minute Airbnb cabin. But otherwise, the plot points of the movie are so astonishingly similar that you might well experience déjà vu.
How does The Strangers: Chapter 1 compare to The Strangers?
Credit: John Armour for Lionsgate
Once more, a handsome, straight white couple from the city spends the night in a remote rural cabin, and are mercilessly and violently tormented by a mysterious trio of masked intruders. The masks from The Strangers resurface here with little discernible differences. And the routine of the killings is religiously the same, from start to finish: A young woman, whose face is lost to darkness thanks to an unscrewed porch light, knocks on the door asking if Tamara is there. Strange noises and blood-red graffiti in a bedroom hint that someone has already gotten into the house. Creepy wide shots confirm this to the viewer, while the female victim — left alone by her male partner — remains oblivious. The remote location means there is nowhere to run. The victims’ phones and vehicles are strategically destroyed by the invaders. With no escape likely, death seems as inevitable as the killers’ motivations are inexplicable.
Which begs the question, if Harlin and company are going to hew this closely to the original, why bother making this movie at all? It’s not just that the other movie already exists. It’s also that the scares in this movie fall flat because of how we as audiences have changed since 2008. Back then, The Strangers served as a rebellion in the reemergence of the slasher, which thanks to the success of Scream had become a subgenre flooded with glossy teen-aimed imitators, like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legends, and The Faculty. By contrast, The Strangers gave audiences a grimmer version of horror, one where no solace would come in the form of unmasking the killer. No motive would give a sense of closure. And the final showdown between killer and Final Girl would be more gutting, literally and metaphorically.
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The Strangers also offered unique terror with the same promise made by horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, Wolf Creek, and Open Water: It claimed to be based on a true story. That is true in only the flimsiest of senses. Bertino found inspiration in the senselessness and maliciousness of the Manson family murders and the unsolved Keddie cabin murders of 1981. (Be warned — googling either is nightmare fuel.) These influences might explain why in the 2008 movie, poor tortured Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) act like they’d never seen a slasher movie before.
That film was set in a contemporary time of cell phones and easy access to the entire Scream franchise (not to mention the decades-old Friday the 13th and Halloween series). And yet the characters had no awareness of slasher “rules,” leading to a throwback shock and general helplessness in the face of random violence. This attitude might have been intended to reflect the naïveté folks had before Manson about what horror might crash into your home without reason. However, Harlin’s Chapter 1 maintains this same ignorance, which feels even less believable in a modern world where true crime has become an omnipresent genre across movies, TV, and podcasts. Frankly, this makes his heroes — in particular, heroine Maya — almost unforgivably obtuse.
Madelaine Petsch stumbles where Liv Tyler sprinted.
Credit: John Armour for Lionsgate.
But it’s not the Riverdale star’s fault. Where The Strangers focused intensely on the relationship crisis between its heroes ahead of their hardship, Petsch’s Maya has no troubles. She and Ryan (Gutierrez), her blandsome boyfriend of five years, are beginning to talk about marriage, but neither seems particularly pressed on the issue. Her main goal at the start of the film is just to get to a job interview in Portland, Oregon, so she can be an architect. Ryan, meanwhile, is also there. Their characters, despite having plenty of pre-invasion time to talk, are not much defined beyond this, and so feel like flimsy stand-ins for the original tortured twosome. Their screams, while earnest, feel like little more than echoes.
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Beyond the lack of characterization, The Strangers set up interpersonal tension before any intruder creepiness kicked in, which grounded the film in an eerie banality — essentially urging audiences to imagine what if an already shitty day ended with this?! Chapter 1 has no such tension, and instead coasts on audience awareness of what is to come. Behold the cliches of creepy rural horror: a rural strip of road dotted by only a handful of buildings; locals who range from odd to nosy, to downright menacing. And then for good measure, the angel-faced evangelical boys with proselytizing pamphlets who popped by at the end of the 2008 movie also make an appearance. When Ryan picks a fight with a surly mechanic, we know this outsider is doomed. But that also breaks some of the tension the original had, as the world beyond the couple’s cabin was a mystery.
While the 2008 sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, shook things up by adding two teen siblings to the mix, The Strangers: Chapter 1 instead expands to Venus, Oregon, a small town of a few hundred, which boasts businesses like Rudy’s Garage and Molly’s Diner, all with rusted facades that match the yellowing teeth of the scowling residents. With one short sequence in which Ryan and Maya make a pit stop on their way to Portland, this trilogy-starter shifts from proposing no motive for the attack to suggesting the petty kind common in rural horror, in which city-associated outsiders are hunted with relish. (See: Deliverance, Straw Dogs, The Wicker Man, Men.)
The Strangers: Chapter 1 aims to build lore but is a bore.
Credit: John Armour for Lionsgate
Remarkably, the (very few) ways in which The Strangers: Chapter 1 is notably different from The Strangers also make it less interesting. The introduction of characters outside of predator and prey suggests there’s more to these masked murderers than the horrific happenstance of “because you were home.” It undercuts the mysterious menace of the original. Plus, the changes to the intruders’ signature costumes are frankly unimpressive.
In both The Strangers and its sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night, the killers paired their masks with a rumpled business suit, a trendy baby-doll dress, and a casual teen look that’d be well-suited to a mall hang. The incongruity with the masks was jarring, as was their lack of cohesion. These were outfits that might seem like puzzle pieces, but they refused to fit together; as a result, our brains ran wild with possible explanations.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 chucks these costumes, as well as the long blonde hair of one of the assailants. Now, they all wear hiking boots, jeans, and khaki jackets that would be equally suitable for hunting in the forest or hitting the flea markets in Brooklyn. It’s giving nothing. Which perhaps is supposed to be more haunting, but instead is unengaging. Off-the-rack slasher fashion is something few outside Jason Voorhees can pull off.
Between the repeated plot points and uninspired changes, all that’s left is the ghoulish spectacle of human misery. As was the case in the prior installments, the horror here is pure nihilism. Unmoored from the morality and twisted motives of standard slasher movies, The Strangers: Chapter 1 doesn’t offer hope or a hero to root for. Instead, it offers a front-row seat to the kind of violent crimes that make for seedy news coverage, relishing in the carnage. The opening credits even play into such fear-mongering, claiming a violent crime happens in the U.S. every 23.1 seconds. And yet, the film behaves as if its victims have absolutely zero awareness of such potential horrors, all the more outrageous when one is a young white woman — the primary demographic for the true crime genre! But because Maya and Ryan are babes in the woods, when the intruders do their thing, there’s little forward momentum and more panicked meandering, with much screams and tears.
Personally, nihilistic horror hits me as more unpleasant and depressing than engagingly scary. Such bleakness bleeds out tension, making for a remake that is merciless but also exhaustingly familiar. The most haunting part of The Strangers: Chapter 1 is its finale’s promise for more, when a title card threatens, “To be continued…”
The Strangers: Chapter 1 opens in theaters May 17.
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