Renny Harlin‘s home invaders are coming back for more. With the announcement that Saw XI was cut out of Lionsgate‘s release schedule for this year, The Strangers: Chapter 2 has taken over its September 26 release date. The follow-up to Harlin’s remake last year, The Strangers: Chapter 1, celebrated the announcement with a haunting new image showing a bloody Madelaine Petsch with a massive messy scar. Though it will hit theaters later than imagined, the Riverdale star assured that the wait will be worth it in an official statement, saying, “I promise that we’re making The Strangers: Chapter 2 as terrifying as possible, and I can’t wait to show you on September 26.”
Little is known about Chapter 2 aside from where the first film left viewers off. Chapter 1 was a mostly straightforward remake of the original 2008 film starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, with Petsch and Froy Gutierrez playing young couple Maya and Ryan who are forced to stay the night in a remote cabin after their car breaks down in an ominous small town. Their road trip becomes a nightmare when the house is terrorized by masked strangers attacking them precisely “because you’re here.” While the original film ended with the couple’s death, Harlin‘s sequel seeks to deepen the story, picking up once Maya wakes up from the hospital only to find that her killers are still on the loose and, even worse, they’re likely the good samaritans that offered to give her a ride.
“Like Strangers fans everywhere, we’re thrilled for Chapter 2 — it’s the kind of film that’ll have audiences watching through their fingers,” producers Mark Canton and Courtney Solomon said about the sequel. “Bringing it to theaters this Halloween season is perfect, and we can’t wait for everyone to see where the story goes next.” Harlin‘s first attempt at recapturing the magic of the tense original wasn’t well-received — it holds a 21% Rotten Tomatoes score with critics and 43% with audiences — but it was a modest success at the box office with $48.1 million worldwide. As the film moves beyond the story of the original, the studio hopes the Die Hard 2 director can keep the train rolling apace with Ema Horvath and Gabriel Basso returning as part of the cast.
Who Else Is Behind ‘The Strangers: Chapter 2’?
Rejoining Harlin on the creative end are Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, who once again penned the script after working with the story from the original film’s director Bryan Bertino. In addition to Canton and Solomon, producers include Christopher Milburn, Gary Raskin, Alastair Burlingham, and Charlie Dombek. Chapter 2 will be far from the end of this story the team has been trying to tell, as the Strangers remake was developed as a trilogy packed with more backstory than its predecessor. Solomon told Collider‘s Perri Nemiroff in an interview back in 2023 that, while Chapter 1 hemmed close to Bertino‘s film, the decision to split this into three movies was so Harlin and company could tell the expanded story exactly as they wanted without having to create a single overstuffed horror flick.
“So trilogy is your operative word here, and technically it is, so you’re correct, but it was one big story. So when it was brought to me in the first place, I was like, ‘I don’t really want to do a remake of The Strangers,’ because, I don’t know, that just doesn’t seem right to me. It’s a good film, it has its own place in horror history, I don’t want to do that, you know? So then I thought of a bigger idea that became a story that goes full circle. I thought to myself, ‘It’s one big movie, right? But it’s too big to actually release it as one movie, so then we need to make it into three chapters.’ So it’s because of the story we wanted to tell. So in this particular instance of this, it’s not for, like, mercantile or financial reasons or whatever that we did that. There were some benefits budget-wise, but it wasn’t that, it was the story we wanted to tell in the first place would just make too long a movie all as one.”
The Strangers: Chapter 2 hits theaters on September 26.
via Collider