ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to The Strangers: Chapter 1 director Renny Harlin about the first film in the horror trilogy. Harlin discussed the film’s heroine and setting the tone with a small-town atmosphere. Hitting theaters on May 17, the movie stars Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez.
“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,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: What did you see in Madelaine Petsch for this lead part? What made you know she could carry this whole trilogy? Because it looks like you made a fantastic choice after seeing the first chapter.
Renny Harlin: Thank you so much. I’m really glad to hear that, and you’re saying that without seeing the second and third chapter, where she really goes beyond anything that you could imagine. These were big boots to fill. Liv Tyler in the original was incredible. We knew from the get-go that just a pretty and good actor wouldn’t be enough, that there had to be something special about her. Having met dozens of actors, we were actually on a Zoom call with Madelaine and immediately felt like, okay, we knew she had the talent. We knew she was beautiful, but she was strong, she was articulate, she was intelligent, she was charming, she was funny, she was passionate and you could just feel also the physicality in her that she could pull it off. We just immediately knew that she’s the one.
Once we got to the locations and were doing some of the last weeks of prep, and she was there with us, we really could sense her commitment to this part. What she was ready to go through physically and mentally, and the ideas that she had. So she really became our partner in this endeavor and helped us with the script and the characters and the dialogue and everything. Because the movie is always a kind of a developing beast as you are shooting it, especially when you’re doing three movies at the same time. So I can’t imagine anybody else doing what she did. Especially in the second and the third movies, we drag her through broken glass and burning coals, and she just keeps going. So it’s an incredible feat what she did.
What impressed me the most about The Stranger Chapter 1 was how you really got that sense of dread of a small town and everything just feeling slightly off-putting. How was it nailing that tone for the town? Because it’s a great tease of what’s to come.
It was a really interesting challenge creating this place where our couple goes in the beginning of the movie, and I wanted it to be a town that all of us have seen or been to that is a little bit off the beaten path but nothing extraordinary. It’s just that you go to a gas station, or you go to a diner, and if you squint your eyes and start looking at the people, you start wondering, “Are they staring at me? What are they thinking?” Are those bad thoughts or good thoughts?
The thing that I wanted to avoid for sure was that the audience could feel like, “Oh, this is a town full of insane people. These are all serial killers,” or something like this. I wanted to really root it in reality and that this is just like any place in America or anywhere in the world, but that the people are still interesting. You look at their faces and the story behind their faces, but they are normal people. So that was a key to me for this movie to be believable, realistic, and make us feel like we can empathize with the characters. It is that it’s all just reality.
Thanks to Renny Harlin for taking the time to speak about The Strangers: Chapter 1.
