Interviews
How ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ Is Only the First Act in an “Expanding Stranger-Verse” [Interview]
Out this week is The Strangers: Chapter 1, the first installment of a new reboot trilogy from director Renny Harlin (A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Master, Deep Blue Sea). While Harlin previously detailed fresh plans for the overarching trilogy, Chapter 1 first aims to recreate the visceral terror of Bryan Bertino’s original film.
It also lays the groundwork for what’s ahead, introducing the peculiar small town of Venus, Oregon.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Harlin, producer Courtney Solomon, and executive producer/star Madelaine Petsch (“Riverdale”) about the seeds planted for Chapters 2 and 3 within The Strangers: Chapter 1 ahead of its release in theaters this Friday, May 17, 2024.
Based on the original 2008 cult horror franchise, the project features Petsch as Maya, who drives cross-country with her longtime boyfriend, Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), to begin a new life in the Pacific Northwest. When their car breaks down in Venus, Oregon, they’re forced to spend the night in a secluded Airbnb, where they are terrorized from dusk till dawn by three masked strangers.
There’s no question that rebooting The Strangers with not one but three movies, all telling one continuous, evolving story, is ambitious. While Renny Harlin was more than up to the task, Courtney Solomon shares what made the director the perfect collaborator on a project that’s more like a miniseries than a straight reboot.
The Strangers – Chapter 1. Photo Credit: John Armour
“Obviously, he has a horror pedigree from the past, and we’re all aware of what it is,” Solomon tells us. “I was looking for somebody who was a great shooter, so I was looking for somebody who would work with me so that I could worry about story and character, which is where my strength lies. In this particular thing, you’re more taking on a sort of showrunner role because it’s a giant movie and somebody that could then give me the Hitchcockian shots that I was looking for to build the suspense and the tension.
Solomon continues, “Together, we could actually blend our talents and our resources, obviously with everybody else on the crew and the amazing cast and Mads and the whole thing. I had been a fan of a bunch of Renny’s work for a long time. I always regaled him as one of the top shooters. When I sent him this 289-page script, he was down for the journey because everybody knows Renny will go on any journey. He’s an explorer.“
Chapter 1 mostly adheres to the familiar beats of Bertino’s film, but with a few noteworthy teases of where the trilogy will head next. Part of that stems from the town where protagonists Maya and Ryan find themselves navigating the locals’ quirks. Some residents are spotted in the background only, like Richard Brake, surely to play a larger role in some capacity, right?
Harlin teases what’s ahead, “Obviously, there are some interesting actors there, and the idea is to introduce the town and some of those actors we’ll see in all three movies, some of them in two, some of them only in one. But definitely, my goal was to introduce a town without, by any means, making it look like a madhouse of crazy, weird characters with interesting faces that could be completely innocent, or maybe some of them could be something more than what’s on the surface.”
Madelaine Petsch as Maya in The Strangers. Photo Credit: John Armour
It’s no spoiler to say that Petsch spends most of Chapter 1 in an intense state of fear due to the cabin siege by the masked trio. As palpable as Maya’s fear of her attackers can be, there’s also a defiance that pokes through. When asked whether that may be truer to Maya’s core or hint toward her overarching arc, Petsch offers more insight into her character.
“I think a person can be two things at once,“ Petsch reflects. “Of course, she was fearful for her life, she was fearful for the possibility of losing Ryan, but she is at heart a stubborn, defiant individual who is resilient and tenacious and won’t back down. So, I think it is definitely a little bit of a keyhole into the future.“
Bloody Disgusting also asked Solomon whether The Strangers: Prey at Night factored into the new trilogy in the process of evolving the story, and the producer expanded more on what to expect. That comes with the emphasis that Chapter 1 is only the first act of the story.
Solomon explained, “We were trying to make our own flavor, but we looked at both that were done. I mean, the first chapter in this, really, is like using the DNA of the original because it was done so well, and it’s the setup for this really amazing story that we’re telling. Why try to improve on something that was done so well as far as the DNA is concerned, the basic beats? Then, we customize to what we’re doing. Also, there’s a new horror audience out there that’s never seen the original. All we’re doing is expanding The Strangers-verse. I knew the OG people would go with us on that part of the journey because this is not over until you watch the end of Chapter 3. If you want to judge this version of The Strangers, you have to go through all the chapters. That’s what this is.”
“But I think they’re going to be very satisfied because we never changed the tone at all through that. In fact, it gets more intense, not less intense. And movie two was nothing like movie one at all. It’s not a repeat in any way,” he adds. “It’s an evolution, both from the point of view of the protagonist and actually being there, if this really happened to you, we go beat by painful beat. That’s the horror. And a little glimpse further into who’s behind the mask without them ever giving a speech or us coming up with some dumb explanation.“
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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