Lionsgate’s The Strangers: Chapter 1 launches a reboot trilogy based on the 2008 home invasion film, all three movies shot simultaneously under the direction of Renny Harlin.
To tide you over until Chapter 2, Chapter 1‘s home video release offers an audio commentary from star Madelaine Petsch and producer Courtney Solomon that hints at what’s to come.
Here are six things I learned from The Strangers: Chapter 1 commentary.
1. The opening music cue was inspired by The Shining.
The film’s opening establishing shot roving over the woods — with Bratislava, Slovakia standing in for the small town of Venus, Oregon — evokes the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which was also a point of reference for the score.
“When we were scoring this, we looked at The Shining,” says Courtney Solomon, referring to Wendy Carlos’ iconic main title theme. “‘Cause we were looking for how, even though it’s dated, they were in that open, sort of everything environment, musically.”
Justin Caine Burnett (I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, 9-1-1: Lone Star) composed the score.
2. The cold open features an important character to the trilogy.
Shot together like one long movie, The Strangers trilogy will take place over a four-day period, with each subsequent entry picking up immediately after its predecessor’s finale.
Chapter 1‘s cold open features actor Ryan Bown — doing his own stunts, as Petsch points out — as a character who will play a bigger role in the coming installments.
“Jeff Morell, we’ll come to find out who this guy is as we go through all three chapters, but we sort of begin here,” Solomon notes.
“He’s a pretty important piece to this puzzle,” teases Petsch. “Some might say the piece.”
They also hint that viewers haven’t seen the last of Rachel Shenton’s Debbie, who Petsch’s Maya talks to on FaceTime, along with many of the townspeople from the diner scene.
3. Petsch was terrified of the project due to her love of the original film.
The shadow of the original Strangers looms large over Chapter 1. Petsch is “such a fan” that she was hesitant about doing a new version:
“I was terrified to touch that property. I think it’s an incredibly perfect horror film. I’ve seen so many horror films, and I feel like it’s one of the only ones that’s truly scared me to my bones, that I still think about all the time. So as we were trying to expound upon that story, with the second and third movies, we had to naturally repel the first story.”
Solomon similarly thinks highly of the original:
“I love the original Strangers. I wasn’t as big a fan of the sequel [2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night], because it was just another story in a trailer park with the Strangers. I didn’t love that two of the Strangers got killed. That was just me personally; there are people that liked it. I was like, ‘I’d like to do something more interesting.’ In order to do it, to find that balance of retelling what made the first one so great as the basis to be able to launch off and tell the rest of the story.”
Petsch adds, “As we know, at the end of the first one, one of the last shots is Liv [Tyler]’s eyes opening. I’ve always wondered what happens after that.”
4. The killers’ hair is concealed to hide their identity.
Although the filmmakers opted to keep the look of the titular Strangers true to the original, Dollface and Pin-Up Girl’s hair is now concealed. This was a “purposeful change” to hide their identities, which will presumably be revealed later in the trilogy.
“We had a specific reason for doing it, obviously, because you do end up meeting a bunch of the folk from this small town,” explains Solomon. “You don’t know who’s wearing the mask, so if we had given up the hair that would make that identification a little bit easier.”
5. Petsch conceived the shower scene based on a personal fear.
In addition to starring in all three films, Petsch is an exclusive producer on the trilogy. More than a mere vanity credit, she had creative input throughout the stages of production, including the addition of Chapter 1‘s shower scene.
“This was not in the original script, the shower. Maybe our first week we were talking about what would be the scariest thing for me if I was in a situation like this,” she recalls. “I shared with you that every time I take a shower and I’m at the point where there’s suds of soap in my eyes and I’m shampooing, I’m always sure that’s when the serial killer’s gonna walk in. So we wrote this in, because I think that must be a common experience.”
6. Remaking the original film was a conscious decision to kick off the trilogy.
It’s not until the end titles that the pair directly address the thought process behind launching the reboot trilogy with a retread of the original.
“Some people may go and watch this and go, ‘Oh, my god. It was a remake of the original.’ But actually this is just act one of our giant movie! If you watched it as a whole, then you’d be like, ‘Oh, shit. That’s just where it started,” says Solomon. “This is the 90-minute setup of the entire thing.”
Petsch concurs, “Don’t get me wrong. I also feel like the original is so good that it would be crazy to just do a remake of the original, but in order to tell the story that we were trying to tell, you kind of have to go back and do a repurposing of that story with these two new characters.”
“They did the whole first movie, the original, amazing, but that’s the jumping off point. This entire giant movie that’s become three chapters was done with a lot of love,” Solomon concludes.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is available now on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital.
