The Strangers: Prey at Night, sicks Dollface, Man in the Mask and Pin-Up Girl on a new family in a bigger playground. Mike (Martin Henderson) and Cindy (Christina Hendricks) bring their kids Kinsey (Bailee Madison) and Luke (Lewis Pullman) to a trailer park to visit their grandparents. When the Strangers attack, the family tries to run, but just getting outside isn’t enough to escape the Strangers.
Directed by 47 Meters Down director Johannes Roberts, The Strangers: Prey at Night has several intense outdoor sequences. One takes place in the trailer park swimming pool.
“It was a funny sequence,” Roberts told Bloody-Disgusting. “We were talking about how the pool should look. We wanted it to be much smaller. Then the location we ended up, there was some kind of tax incentive. It was not necessarily our first choice. We got there and that pool was enormous. It’s bigger than an Olympic pool. It was like wow, how on Earth are we going to make this work? It just kind of fell into place. It’s beautiful production design by Freddy Waff with the palm trees. It just landed.”
Certainly, after making an entire movie in a water tank, a mere swimming pool was no match for Roberts.
“The underwater bits of it were not particularly tough,” he said. “Having done 47, the water didn’t really phase me. I filmed the whole thing on an iPhone beforehand and we just shot it. It has the best shot in the movie with the zoom lens, where the Stranger runs out. It was a good fun day actually. We were right by the river and I’d never seen anything like it when we turned the lights on, the entire of Kentucky’s insect life descended on us. It was quite terrifying. We literally had people, I just had to have teams of people taking these insects out of the pool because it looked like the water was alive when we were filming.”
47 also plays a major role in Prey at Night. Roberts promises that is not an homage to his last movie.
“It wasn’t and I’m a little bit embarrassed about it. I kept meaning to change it. It was there in the initial script. I kept meaning to change it. It looks a bit silly, I’ve just done 47 Meters and now the trailer’s called 47. We just never got around to changing it and there it is. No, it was pure coincidence that is there. It’s also the number of Stephen King’s address in Maine. I just went to his house the other day just to do the tourist/stalker thing and I was like no way, that’s crazy.”
Trailers make pretty poor hiding places, but there’s really nowhere else to run.
“Although a lot of it is outside, it is one contained location. It just made it this terrifying playground. It was like a massive playground so it was tricky but it was a lot of fun. It was tricky I think for Ryan Samul our DP to light.”
Even at night, lighting could be tricky. You don’t want the audience to see a Stranger before they make their move.
“You play around with certain things. I’ve been doing scary movies all my life. I know certain tricks, but it’s funny how each time you try a new film and you think I know how to scare people, it just never quite works the same way each time. There’s a scene where Dollface walks out of the trees while Bailee/Kinsey is against the fence. Dollface just sort of pops out of the shadows and everything just worked beautifully with the lighting and her mask. Then sometimes it just didn’t quite work. It was a really good location, especially the way we filmed it with all the zoom lenses and stuff for the strangers to be in the distance and just be scary in the darkness.”
The Strangers: Prey at Night opens Friday, March 9.
