“I always say this is the craziest business, as there’s no other industry where people will spend endless millions making something without knowing if people will want to buy it”, the filmmaker told Zavvi. “If you’re making a car or a phone, you do research to see if this is something people will want, you don’t just put it out in the store – and with a movie, you can be a week away from the release and have no idea, it never stops being a nervous time!
“Shooting three movies at the same time was a liberating experience, a fantastic chance to explore these characters for four-and-a-half hours rather than do one 90-minute movie and wait a few years to make a sequel. However, we were always making it with the expectation that we’d learn from the audience when they saw the first movie, and we studied what they were saying and went back for additional shooting based on their feedback.”
Originally supposed to be released in 2024, the sequels were delayed as Harlin and the cast reunited for “enhancement shoots” to give fans what they wanted – but the big request they heard from audiences was a difficult one to get right, as it could ruin the mystery of the franchise if done badly.
“The main thing we heard was that the audience wanted to find out more about the Strangers themselves. The additional shooting was largely to add scenes to reveal more about their backstory, however, we didn’t want to make it trivial – we took the approach that serial killers are born sociopaths, so there was no trite origin story about something that transformed them as kids, they’re just like that.
“It was a difficult one, because the fascination with this mythology is that the killings are random, there’s no reason for their killings. Looking under the hood of these killers and learning about them whilst maintaining their mystique was the biggest challenge.”
Harlin hopes that once it’s all been released, the trilogy will be seen as one epic movie. The first chapter functioned as a straightforward remake of the 2008 original to reintroduce audiences into this world, but he stresses that it was designed to be seen as the first act of a story which will now refuse to tread familiar ground.
Riverdale star Madelaine Petsch returns as Maya, waking up in hospital after becoming the first person to survive a run-in with the masked murderers, who have very quickly tracked her down. From the opening moments, Chapter 2 quickly becomes more of a survival thriller than a slasher, with very little dialogue and far fewer kills than you’d expect from the genre – a bold change of pace considering how faithful the previous film was to the original.
“I felt liberated getting out of the first movie, as that had to be a remake to set the stakes for the rest of the story; now I was able to get out of that house and the town and escape into the wilderness. I love in any movie, especially in horror movies, when I can visually take the audience on a journey without relying on dialogue exposition – I didn’t even realise until somebody pointed out to me that there’s half an hour with no dialogue!
“I didn’t stop to analyse this whilst making it, but I was aware of the main challenge this approach presented; how do you maintain the tension purely through visuals alone?”
As a blueprint, Harlin didn’t look towards other horror movies, but to other gruesome tales of wounded protagonists forced to fight for their lives in the wilderness.
“I always said the second movie should feel like Rambo: First Blood, in the sense that this is a survival story fuelled by the paranoia that anybody she meets could be out to get her. She can’t trust anybody she meets and must survive on her own wits as nobody will come and help her, whether she’s in the wilderness or the hospital – she must use her environment to her benefit and make it an ally rather than an enemy.”
Over the course of the trilogy, which takes place across five days in Maya’s life, we’re going to see her increasingly worn down, fighting for survival while given no time to recover from the growing number of injuries she’s sustained.
“We saw a huge number of actors for this role, and we knew Madelaine would be perfect when we first spoke to her. She understood that the script wouldn’t even begin to describe the journey she was going to take, because she needed to be really dragged through the wood – the shoot was going to be wet, cold and miserable, and she was not only excited for this, but wanted us to make it harder for her!
“With each scene, she was wanting us to think about how we could make her character’s circumstances even harder; it was a great collaboration because she’s tough as nails. What you see onscreen isn’t all movie makeup – she did get beaten up by the elements, and was bruised everywhere, she faced off against some really tough things.”
The “enhancement shoots” for the second film ended up changing the direction of the story more than anybody involved could have predicted, and the team ended up going back to the drawing board for the third and final chapter.
“We were arrogant that we wouldn’t need to do any additional shooting for the third one – then we shot the new scenes for the second film, and as we cut it together and watched it, we realised the third one no longer worked the way it is! I’m grateful that the studio said they trusted my instinct and let me do it, and we just finished shooting that a couple of months ago.
“It’s edited, we’re just finishing the sound edit and the score, and I’m hoping it will be seen in the spring. This second film is such a surprise, especially in the direction it takes, that I think it will blow everyone away – I won’t need to make any more additional changes now!”
There’s a vague mid-credits teaser of the final film, promising more carnage, but Harlin ensures me that it once again won’t be the straightforward slasher it appears to be.
“What I can promise with the third one is that you’ll also never guess where it goes, it’s another left turn. We’re following a protagonist whose mental state keeps changing, who is getting more and more injuries from this ordeal, facing enemies who have never had a victim who has survived them – this experience affects the killers as well as just her, and it’s about how they choose to fix that, rather than simply trying to kill her...”
The Strangers: Chapter 2 is released in UK cinemas on Friday, 26th September.
