By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT
Director Renny Harlin has built a career moving comfortably between epic action films and equally epic horror movies. From Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger to A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Exorcist: The Beginning, he works on a grand scale. Renny Harlin films, successful or otherwise, are BIG with a capital B. An ambitious cinematic risk-taker, the Finnish-born filmmaker always swings for the fences, consequences be damned.
Now, Harlin is bringing that legendary ambition to what many might consider a wholly unexpected project. 2024 will see the release of THE STRANGERS TRILOGY, three films that continue the bloody saga of the masked killers from Bryan Bertino’s 2008 cult hit in one epic narrative. RUE MORGUE caught up with Renny Harlin before a first-look panel discussion with producer Courtney Solomon at New York Comic Con to get the inside story on the upcoming slasher trilogy.
Thank you for speaking with RUE MORGUE. How are you doing this morning?
I’m great. I flew in last night from New Zealand, and I’ve had a good sleep, and I’m ready to rock!
Let’s talk about THE STRANGERS TRILOGY. How did you get involved in this project? What attracted you to the material?
Director Renny Harlin
My old friend Courtney Solomon, the producer, sent me the script, which was about 280 pages long. And I read it. And I said I love this. But this is the longest script I’ve ever read in my life! And then he said, Well, we’re actually planning to do three movies. And I said, Did you know that The Strangers is one of my favorite horror films ever? I can’t pass on this opportunity. This is too incredible for me not to be involved.
I love the original, and I felt there’s an opportunity now to explore these themes even more and give the generation that might not be familiar with the original the treat of this movie made in 2023. Like myself, I bet a lot of fans of the original movie have been asking the questions of why and how and what was behind this senseless random attack in the film. Why were these people the victims? And who are these people who went after them? That’s what I read in those 280 pages – the exploration of where this journey could go directly after the end of the first film. I felt, wow, what an opportunity to give the fans what they enjoyed originally and go far beyond it and give a new audience an epic horror journey that’s three movies long.
I have so many questions that I know you can’t answer, but touching on the killers. How do you keep from destroying their mystique and the mystery by revealing their motives and their backstories?
We do it very carefully. And really, the three movies, more than anything, are the exploration of our central character, played by Madelaine Petsch. This is an exploration of what might happen to a person, in this case, a young woman, who is the victim of random violence – just mind-blowing, horrible, horrible violence – and what could happen to somebody mentally and physically.
That’s what we explore in the second and third movies and just go deeper and deeper into her psyche. Of course, the strangers are a big part of it, but I don’t think we give away too much. We give a suggestion of why and where these horrible people are coming from. Or are they so horrible in the end? It’s kind of an exploration of what makes somebody a serial killer and why. I know that by the end of the third movie, the audience will have even more questions than they had after the first movie.
Do you follow up on any of the plot points or bring in any narrative threads from the previous two films into this trilogy?
In the first movie, we definitely tell a similar story as in the original film. I think that it’s only fair to the fans of the movie to give them the 2023 version of that story and those characters so that they feel like we have done justice to the movie that they loved. Then, we go far beyond it in the second and third movies. We ignore the original sequel. We are not going there at all. We are just very, very faithful to the first movie and those characters and where they go from there.
Madelaine Petsch as Maya in THE STRANGERS TRILOGY. Photo Credit: John Armour
It’s been sixteen years since the original THE STRANGERS was released. Why does the world need a Strangers film now? Obviously, the world has changed dramatically. How does this new trilogy reflect these changing times?
The world is changing rapidly and in many ways. Existence has become more dangerous and more threatened than it might have been sixteen years ago, so I think that the time is very ripe for the exploration of something like this. I think that the audience is always seeking these kinds of cathartic experiences. That’s one reason why horror films are such a successful genre. People feel many mixed feelings and fears in their ordinary lives – even more today than sixteen years ago. To be able to go to the movies and live them out in a safe experience in a safe community is helpful for all of us. It’s an entertainment experience that maybe relieves some of those pressures and uncertainties that we live under in these days. So, I think it was it was time to tell this story to a new generation.
Froy Gutierrez as Ryan and Madelaine Petsch as Maya in THE STRANGERS TRILOGY, a Lionsgate release. Photo Credit: John Armour for Lionsgate
What are some of the challenges of shooting three films simultaneously? What stages of completion are the films in?
The big challenge was that we didn’t shoot these back to back; We shot them at the same time. So literally, you could be shooting episode two Monday morning and episode one Monday afternoon and episode three Tuesday morning. The biggest demands were on the actors and being in the right mental state and the right place at the right time – and remembering what we were shooting at any given time. Same thing for the crew, for the director of photography and myself. It was a very, very unusual way [to work]. I don’t think it’s ever been done or anybody’s shot three movies like this. At the same time, it was exhilarating. It was exciting. It was fun, and we were really going, in a matter of minutes, from one extreme to another.
At the moment, the first movie is completely finished. The second movie is edited. The third movie is still being edited. They will be finished in the coming months – all of them. But the first movie is ready to come out, hopefully soon, in 2024.
Is the plan to release all three of these films in 2024?
I believe so. Of course, you can never read the mind of a distributor, but I believe that all three movies will be coming out next year, and I believe there will be more of these movies. I think that we leave so many interesting questions open at the end of the third movie that I fully expect that there’s going to be more of these movies, so the important thing for us was to start with these three and not make the audience wait four years to see the next one … Hopefully, it’ll be just a matter of a few months between the movies so you can continue the journey as soon as possible.
It’s hard enough to get one film in a year. Why would you do this to yourself?
[Laughs] I know! I know! Yeah, it wasn’t easy. Also, most of the shooting was at night, so I became like a vampire. I was sleeping during the day and shooting at night for a very long time. So I think it affected all of us, not just the actors but the crew also. It had a pretty big impact on all of our lives.
For obvious reasons, the average moviegoer thinks of Renny Harlin as an action director, but horror fans know you best for movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Exorcist: The Beginning. However, there’s a grandiosity about your films, regardless of genre. Will THE STRANGERS TRILOGY have that big Renny Harlin scope with huge setpieces that we know from your other work? Or is this more of an intimate affair?
That’s a good question. By the way, don’t forget, my first American movie was called Prison, and that was also a horror film. But really, really good question. I would say that the first movie is very faithful to the original film in the sense that it’s very intimate. Then, the second movie gets more epic, and the third movie is even bigger.
For this genre, the most important thing, particularly in The Strangers universe, is that it always feels real. It has to be rooted in reality and the fact that it could happen to any of us. There’s nothing supernatural in it, so there are no big special effects or big, elaborate set pieces. It all starts with an individual in extraordinary circumstances. Reality is the key, but just sort of in terms of the setting and some of the events, the movies definitely get bigger and more cinematic, but keeping that intimacy with the characters is very much in focus, as well as keeping it in a world where this really could be any of us, any day.
Check out the suspense-packed first clip from THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 1.
