Director Renny Harlin Talks The Conclusion To His Strangers Trilogy
The journey of Madelaine Petsch’s Maya, the scream queen at the heart of the Strangers reboot trilogy, has always been designed to bring her to the dark side – but the journey to get her there kept transforming during production.
All three Strangers chapters were shot simultaneously, although the second and third entries went under extensive reshoots after the release of the first. This was to flesh out the backstory of the mysterious masked killers themselves, but that process had a similarly transformative effect on the protagonist.
Director Renny Harlin explained to Zavvi: “It was the plan from the get-go to have Maya blur the lines between victim and killer, but there were moments where we weren’t sure the specific way we’d frame her within that spectrum. There were three different paths we could have taken, the first being that she becomes the avenging angel who kills everybody, and lives happily ever after when she’s satisfied that they’re not coming back.
“The second path was where she kills them, but becomes damaged herself for having to commit murder, and questions whether she’s just as evil as them for doing it. And then there’s the Stockholm Syndrome version, where she crosses to the dark side, falls in love with her captors and joins forces with them – we filmed each of these variants and played around with the scenarios.
“I think we ultimately found something that is true to these movies and this character’s journey, even if it’s not necessarily what the audience feel they would do if this happened to them!”
Chapter 2, which Harlin likened to Rambo: First Blood as a sparse survival thriller, ended with Maya discovering one of the Strangers’ identities, and killing another before fleeing the crime scene. Taking place across one wild weekend, Chapter 3 wastes little time throwing her back against the elements and two masked maniacs on her tail.
It’s also the most ambitious, with supporting characters like Richard Brake’s Sheriff Rotter coming under greater scrutiny, revealing more about the Strangers’ past and how their killing sprees have largely been swept under the carpet.
“I didn’t have a blueprint for this one like I did last time with First Blood”, Harlin added. “I can’t pinpoint a comparison to a single other movie, as my aim was to make this the most contained and intimate of them, whilst also being the scariest and deadliest.
“It was an opportunity for me to really surprise the audience with Maya’s journey and the ways she changes.”
When I spoke to Harlin a few months ago about the prior chapter, we couldn’t discuss the newly conceived backstory for the Strangers in too much detail. In that film, it was revealed the killings started when Scarecrow and Pin-up Girl were both in primary school, murdering a classmate in a way that formed the blueprint for their now ritualistic attacks.
The psychology of serial killers being rooted in their childhood is a cliched idea, and Harlin stresses that the main challenge with developing the lore of the Strangers was avoiding these familiar tropes.
“But at the same time, it would be lazy if we made three movies following this continuous story and never learned anything about them beyond the fact they’re masked sociopaths. We wanted to offer certain markers of their lives but not turn it into the cheap child psychology thing of suggesting they’re pissed off because they didn’t have enough toys.
“As weird as it might sound, we wanted to humanise them a little bit, as it was more interesting to suggest they have relationships and emotions behind the masks, that their killings were not the full sum of who they are. I mean, they’re still sociopathic murderers, but we wanted to pick moments from their childhood that could give the audience hints of how they ended up here without making it too simple.
“You can see in the trailer that they have the opportunity to kill Maya but capture her and make her wear a mask instead. Exploring their psychology, and why they wouldn’t kill certain people lined up as victims, and vice versa in the case of why she doesn’t immediately kill them, was something I was excited to explore.”
Key to this was hiring Gabriel Basso, star of Netflix’s The Night Agent, as the leader of the pack. That show hadn’t begun airing when the movies began shooting, and Harlin now agrees that securing a breakout star of his calibre now seems unthinkable.
“We hadn’t seen that show; we just saw an actor in the audition who was incredibly charismatic and powerful, and we were far luckier than we should have been in getting him as our main villain! He brings weight and nuance to this character in a way I can’t imagine anybody else doing.
“We didn’t want to have a straightforward bad guy, we wanted a screwed-up sociopath who isn’t easy to read. Through understanding his chemistry with the other actors, we do discover that he has real emotions bubbling under, and I think the way Gabe does display it is incredible.”
The Strangers: Chapter 3 is in UK cinemas from Friday, 6th February.
Alistair is a culture journalist and lover of bad puns from Leeds. A regular writer for Film Inquiry and The Digital Fix, his work has also been found at the BFI, British GQ, Digital Spy, Little White Lies and more. Subject yourself to his bad tweets by following him on Twitter @YesItsAlistair.
