With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
During an interview about the lasting impact of The Strangers—in promotion of a trilogy that remakes and expands upon the original—Madelaine Petsch told me that she has seen the 2008 horror film “conservatively, 30 times.” Whether she’s a good actress, a dedicated horror fangirl, or both, I was convinced, despite not understanding why that horror movie in particular would be especially rewatchable.
It’s not for lack of skillful filmmaking. The Strangers (2008), a downbeat home-invasion/slasher thriller written and directed by Bryan Bertino, is an unusually hushed and somber affair, and a psychological counterpart to the gorier “torture porn” movies that peaked just before its release. In it, a couple (Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) are indeed tortured, but mostly not by blades or other weapons. Staying at a semi-remote summer home for the evening following a friend’s wedding, they’re tormented by the relentless invasion of three masked strangers: quiet at first, then swinging axes with impunity, although never speaking until the end. At that point, when the couple is tied up, helpless, on the brink of a gruesome stabbing death, The Strangers tips its hand as both a note-perfect evocation of primal urban-legend horror destined to be forever rephrased among 12-year-olds at sleepovers, and a potentially eye-rolling edgelord statement about the arbitrary nature of death. Kristen (Tyler) asks why they’re doing all of this to them, and one of the Strangers replies in a chilling yet girlish monotone: “Because you were home.”
The Strangers is very effective at generating tension from limited locations, a small cast, and quiet imagery; the shot of a masked man silently lurking in the background of the house, as yet undiscovered by the couple, is memorably freaky and frequently ripped off. With nearly two decades of hindsight, that moment feels like a missing link between the War On Terror-era nouveau-slasher horrors and the found-footage domestic-invasion pictures that temporarily replaced them. The Paranormal Activity movies simultaneously reward and punish close attention to an indistinct image with flickers of terror that eventually grow more legible. The Strangers‘ version of that watchfulness is both torture-porn blunt and Carpenter-style elegant.
The movie itself also isn’t much fun, even within the bounds of a slasher movie. There’s a pervasive feeling of hopelessness radiating for most of the runtime; even before the Strangers show up, the couple seems pretty tortured by their own frayed relationship. Bertino comes by this sensibility honestly. His other horror movies are similarly dark and seem to spring from a personal place. The Strangers is his most accessible, and it’s still pretty bleak stuff once the thrill of the technique fades and little nuance to the misery lingers. One can understand how transgressive films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or just plain scary ones like Halloween can turn into comfort rewatches, but it seems strange to want to watch The Strangers 30 times.
What about five times, with minor variations? It’s not surprising that The Strangers would get sequels; nearly all slashers that make money inspire a series. The Strangers certainly doesn’t burn it all down at the end; besides the fact that the Strangers themselves ride off into the rising dawn, Kristen is left alive, if maybe only barely, for the film’s final jumpscare, though she doesn’t ultimately return in subsequent films. But the subsequent films push back on the notion of being a series in the first place.
The decade-later The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018) seems to pick up immediately following the first film, following the same masked killers, though they’re played by different actors and have a vaguely different modus operandi than the straightforward house-stalking of the first film. Then, six years after that, Lionsgate kicked off a whole new Strangers trilogy, written as a single script and shot back-to-back as a single project by Renny Harlin, then portioned out into three films that cover a continuous period of five days or so. The continuity between the first two movies and the second three doesn’t match up, but the filmmakers seemed hesitant to describe the new movies as a supersized remake. What the new trilogy winds up doing instead is wandering through a graveyard of familiar yet uncanny horror tropes, shifting between installments like an extra-long dream. It’s effective at times, though not in a way that resembles the power of the original film. But before getting to that reviled, just-concluded saga, one must address Prey At Night, which also lacks the first movie’s simplicity, but is the sneaky series favorite.
Though Bertino seemed to be in early talks to write a sequel to The Strangers after it became one of the biggest horror movies of 2008, that version never came to pass, and Johannes Roberts wound up directing Prey At Night in between his 47 Meters Down movies. The sequel plays more like a traditional slasher than its predecessor, with the trio of Strangers terrorizing a family at a trailer park: first an older couple, and then the family members who happen to be arriving to visit them. The remote location combined with the expanded cast and some vacation trappings makes the movie feel especially akin to a stylish variation on an early Friday The 13th sequel.
This fits with Roberts’ retro stylings: His Resident Evil reboot is a Carpenter pastiche, his recent Primate is an old-fashioned, well-crafted creature feature, and his Strangers movie is a nasty slasher where the victims are nonetheless capable of striking back against their stalkers, which never feels like the case in the first movie. There’s also nothing in the first movie remotely akin to a neon-lit pool struggle between two of the Strangers and one of the victims, which Roberts scores to “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” and was good enough for The A.V. Club‘s Best Scenes Of The Year list. There’s nothing much existential about The Strangers: Prey At Night, the genre workout that none of its companions are satisfied with accepting.
The newer Strangers trilogy instead does both more and less, depending on the movie and sometimes the scene. The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) is not one of the “more” installments, because it is more or less a straight remake of the first film, with Maya (Petsch) and her boyfriend Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) passing through a small Oregon town and running into car trouble, forcing them to stay overnight. There, they encounter the same familiar beats: A knock on the door with a dead-voiced stranger asking for “Tamara,” a brief separation of the couple where the menace increases; an eventual ratcheting up from quiet stalking to full-on attack; running and hiding; tied to chairs; stabby stabby, and the girl survives. A number of factors—Maya and Ryan don’t appear to require couples counseling; Petsch in particular makes for a scrappy and likable Final Girl; Renny Harlin is a slick journeyman—render the movie less ominous than its source material, and therefore even more of a weightless, pointless imitator.
Yet it’s hard to imagine the good stuff from The Strangers – Chapter 2 (2025) working without at least some degree of first-movie set-up. By most accounts, Chapter 2 is even worse than Chapter 1, chockablock with middle-movie timekilling. From a storytelling perspective, perhaps it is. But then, none of these movies are really telling a compelling story. They exist in moments of slowly-then-rapidly rising panic, and on that level, The Strangers: Chapter 2 is vastly superior to its predecessor. With Maya waking up in a hospital and almost immediately re-stalked by her masked nemeses, with the help of an unnervingly complicit town, the film essentially proceeds as Halloween II—which is not that impressive as a way to follow Halloween, but a pretty damn good way to follow The Strangers: Chapter 1. Much of the second movie is about Petsch running, hiding, fighting, screaming, and bleeding her way through hospital hallways, lonely roads, and forested areas. At one point Maya is attacked at length by a wild boar. More than anything Harlin has directed in years, there’s a nightmarish pure-cinema quality to these stylish, dialogue-light sequences.
Chapter 2 also doles out some backstory involving the Strangers and their weird, underpopulated Oregon town, to little effect beyond a momentarily eerie sense of Pacific Northwest Gothic (by way of Bratislava, where the movies were shot and near where the torture-porn standard-bearer Hostel takes place). This all fails to come to a head with The Strangers: Chapter 3 (2026), which doesn’t have any major twists up its sleeve, only clarifications about some of that backstory and room for Petsch to limp her way from desperate yet unkillable Final Girl to a more shell-shocked, haunted figure whose next moves become increasingly foggy as the movie keeps killing off the people around her.
The passages of traditional horror often feel perfunctory, yet Harlin still stages some sequences with a hypnotic, low-dialogue glow. Compared to Liv Tyler’s soft glumness, Petsch comes across as spunkier and a little more synthetic in the first two films, not an unexpected result from an actress whose charisma was heightened to such cartoonish levels over seven seasons of Riverdale. In Chapter 3, she’s chillingly still, gradually shedding her survival instinct in favor of more opaque fight-or-flight calculations. It’s no accident that her face becomes more masklike as the movie goes on, and the Strangers themselves lose the theater-kid affectations of their facial costuming. Harlin also uses repeated point-of-view shots, never as sustained as the opening of the original Halloween, but brief shifts that create an off-kilter sense of merging identities between the half-erased victim and the stylized void of her would-be assailants—or, by the end of Chapter 3, possible partner.
Plenty of slashers have flirted with reforming the victim into the victimizer; strictly speaking, this Strangers series teases something pretty routine. Harlin and Petsch revisit this material in such a quiet register that it almost circles back around to the dour mood of the 2008 film. It’s removed from that movie’s evocations of domesticity, however, as if taking place in some liminal space between small-town life as it’s lived and an inescapable ghost town ruled by its past misdeeds. At the same time, the new Strangers trilogy doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts, and often threatens to add up to much less. It’s tempting to analyze the three films for how they could be better arranged to salvage the enterprise as a whole, but structurally and stylistically, they resist easy solutions like “make it all one long movie” or “cut each one down to its best 40 minutes before recombining them.” Chapter 1 is almost entirely disposable, yet Chapter 2 is more effective with the events of an earlier movie behind it, while Chapter 3 only intermittently builds on its predecessor’s momentum while also depending on the exhaustion that sets in after multiple hours in this world. Maybe a best-of version could be hashed out to run two hours and change, but that might simply make efficient hackwork of the trilogy’s most distinctive passages.
As is, all these entries turn a simple, effective slasher into a series wandering through horror detritus, looking for spare parts that might be assembled into the next sensation for a subgenre that has largely been relegated back to the world of low-budget exploitation. That’s most evident in the trilogy, which starts as a remake similar to the slickly bland redos that were popular at the time of the ’08 movie’s initial release, moves into Halloween II for the second film, and then finally morphs into a weird cross between Texas Chain Saw hopelessness and the status-quo shifts of a late-period slasher sequel—all at an annual cadence from Lionsgate reminiscent of the Saw series. But that shapeshifting quality can be applied to Prey At Night, too, with its throwback thrills and indie-studio demotion; even the original film is poised between torture porn and a found-footage imitation of life.
Together, the Strangers anti-franchise feels like a prolonged search, as if it’s trying to figure out how to actually be an American slasher in the 21st century. What the series comes up with is a fusion of style, experimentation, and good old-fashioned bullshitting as the movies hunt around for greater meaning. The series imitates plenty of American horror classics while also feeling faintly alienated from an immediately recognizable America, both due to the trilogy being shot overseas and the whole franchise being more indebted to other horror movies than real life. It’s an effect not unlike watching The Strangers 30 times, scanning the comfort-watch for hidden depths and finding it elusive in a way that more meaningful horror texts are not. When Maya becomes increasingly numb and empty by the end of Chapter 3, it’s a shrug—a feint from a trilogy in search of a proper ending. But it’s also weirdly authentic, like a horror fan analyzing the screen and then breaking the spell before reaching any firm conclusions, bummed out by their failure to find them. Some horror movies are genre exercises first and subtext delivery machines a distant second, if at all. The Strangers as a series never fully commits itself to either mission. It remains an unknowable stranger, even to itself.
Final ranking:
1. The Strangers – Chapter 2 (2025)
2. The Strangers (2008)
3. The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018)
4. The Strangers – Chapter 3 (2026)
5. The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)