I’ve been watching Renny Harlin’s three-film reboot of “The Strangers” for several years, because that’s how it was foisted upon us, and now that it’s finally over, I’m willing to give it some credit. It was an ambitious idea to turn a classic home invasion thriller into a gigantic pre-planned slasher trilogy. The filmmakers could have phoned the whole thing in and nobody would have blamed them. Heck, given how it all turned out, phoning it in might have been the better plan. But instead they tried something and they deserve an “A” for effort. And a “D” for everything else.
If you’re just now joining us, the original “The Strangers” was an efficient, tightly-edited home invasion thriller about a young couple attacked by three masked murderers. Why? Because they were home. The ambiguity was the point. It was a horror movie where the horror could happen to anyone, for any reason, at any time, and it was scary as hell. There was an excellent sequel called “The Strangers: Prey at Night,” but when that didn’t set the box office on fire, the studio rebooted the franchise with an inefficient, extremely padded trilogy that revealed everything about the killers and ruined their mystique. They say “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” and they didn’t. They just broke it, seemingly on purpose.
Madelaine Petsch stars as Maya. She was attacked in “Chapter 1,” she ran from the killers in “Chapter 2,” and it sounds like there should be more to her story after two films but there really isn’t. When we catch up to Maya in “The Strangers — Chapter 3” she’s celebrating her first proper victory, having finally killed Pin-Up Girl, one of the three title murderers (she wore the “Pin-Up Girl” mask, try to keep up). Unfortunately for Maya, the leader of the slasher cabal had a romantic thing going with Pin-Up Girl, so now Scarecrow (the one in the scarecrow mask) has weird desires for Maya. He doesn’t want to kill her anymore. He wants her to be the new Pin-Up Girl, which means he has to turn her into a serial killer and make her fall in love with him.
That’s a creepy idea. Horror protagonists have been losing their sanity since the dawn of the genre, and several slasher series already tried to get away with a seemingly stalwart hero turning to the dark side, or at least feeling tempted. “Halloween” tried it a couple times. The “Scream” movies feinted in that direction. Heck, “Saw” made it their whole gimmick after a while. The trick is to put the hero through so much hell that hell becomes their new normal. When their sense of identity shatters they could glom onto anything, even evil, just to make sense of it all. I’m not sure that’s good psychology but it’s an unsettling notion, at any rate.
But if that story was going to work we’d have to believe it, and that’s where “The Strangers — Chapter 3” falls flat. Madelaine Petsch barely had a character to play in the first place, and three films later there’s still very little evidence that she’s playing a real human being. Heck, it was hard to believe she was even scared until the second film. It doesn’t help that everyone else in the cast plays arch, unconvincing archetypes, and it really doesn’t help that the villains’ backstories are perfunctory and shallow.
You can’t shatter the audience’s reality, let alone the hero’s, without establishing reality in the first place, and Harlin’s trilogy is too phony to qualify. A character-driven storyline only works if the characters have character, and a plot-driven storyline doesn’t work if you can’t sell the plot. There’s a scene in “The Strangers — Chapter 3” where Scarecrow finally takes his mask off and an audience member gasped, as if it was a big reveal. But there was already a whole, long scene earlier in the movie where that guy talked about being the killer. The scene had such vague dialogue and monotonous acting and generic filmmaking that the plot point didn’t register the first time.
In my review of “The Strangers — Chapter 1” I talked about how the original film’s title referred not just to the murderers, but also the protagonists, who thought they knew each other but didn’t. (In my review of “Chapter 2” I talked about food poisoning. These movies really wore me down.) As we finally, finally put this whole whoopsie-daisy to bed I find myself wondering who “The Strangers” really were in this reboot trilogy. They can’t be the masked killers. We got to know them too well. And “The Strangers” can’t be the victims, because the victims aren’t complicated enough to be unknowable.
So I’m forced to conclude, in the end, that the strangers in Renny Harlin’s “The Strangers” are the people who thought this was a good idea. They watched one of the scariest movies of the 21st century, made an itemized list of everything that made it work, then ignored those lessons. It’s genuinely hard to fathom. They didn’t even go in a wild new direction. They just tried to do the same schtick, but longer and worse, and let’s face it, “longer and worse” is only the goal if you’re trying to torture somebody.
Wait, was that the point this whole time? Was this supposed to be torture? Mission accomplished, I guess. What a strange mission.
The 25 Best Horror Movie Franchises Ever