The Strangers: Chapter 1 Director Relived A Personal Trauma While Filming The Horror Movie
Renny Harlin's "The Strangers: Chapter 1" is the third film in the "Strangers" series, but is intended to be the first film in a new rebooted trilogy sporting a unique continuity. Not that "The Strangers" possessed a complicated mythology; each movie follows a trio of mute, masked killers — perhaps a family — who have made a sport of breaking into people's houses and torturing them for kicks. In the credits of "Chapter 1," the killers are credited only as Dollface, Pin-Up Girl, and Scarecrow (previously called The Man in the Mask). This time around, they are played by Olivia Kreutzova, Letizia Fabbri, and Matúš Lajčák, respectively.
The plot of "Chapter 1" is as simple as can be: A young city couple (Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez) is driving to Portland, Oregon when they get waylaid in a small town called Venus. Naturally, their car breaks down and they have to stay overnight in a local B&B before repairs can be done. They have cocktails, smoke weed, and have sex in the B&B, merrily discussing the possibility of future nuptials. A creepy young woman knocks on the door. She is the first of three killers who will spend the rest of the film's 91-minute runtime scaring and harming our young heroes. The killers have no motivation for their crimes; when the couple asks them why they might be engaging in such horrible activities, the killers merely reply, "Because you were here."
Harlin was recently interviewed by Entertainment Weekly, and he revealed that he was once the victim of a home invasion. He took the very real-life fears he felt during his harrowing experience and channeled them into "Chapter 1." Some nights of filming, he admits, were triggering.
Renny Harlin's home invasion
"The Strangers: Chapter 1" isn't even the first Renny Harlin movie to feature a home invasion. His 2007 film "Cleaner" with Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Ed Harris, and Kiki Palmer featured a character whose wife had been murdered in a home invasion before the action of the film began. Harlin's 2011 thriller "The Resident" also involves stalking, and he is slated to direct the upcoming "The Strangers: Chapter 2" and "The Strangers: Chapter 3." Harlin only recently shared details of his personal home invasion experience, and noted that it terrified him. Shooting the "Strangers" movies brought back the exact same fears he experienced years before. In his own words:
"My experience made me realize we are completely at the mercy of just that one bad stroke of luck. [...] There were moments at night when we were doing these [scenes] where I did step aside and I had tears in my eyes, but I think people thought I was just really tired or something. But I was reliving that situation."
Luckily, Harlin was not harmed, as his home invader was not violent like they are in "The Strangers." He did say, though, that he had feelings of "helplessness and a violation of the sanctuary." Harlin described the entire experience — which happened in 2000 — to People Magazine, saying that he heard someone outside his bedroom door at night. His dog began barking, and he heard the invaders running away. When he went downstairs, he saw several men running out of his house and driving away in a pickup truck. They had turned on all his lights.
The shower scene
Madelaine Petsch also confessed to EW that filming certain scenes in "The Strangers: Chapter 1" got under her skin. There is a portion of the film wherein the Gutierrez character has taken a motorcycle back to town to pick up some medicine and burgers, leaving the Petsch character alone in the cabin. She plays the piano, plays records, drinks a little more, gets a little high, and starts to get paranoid. In classical horror movie fashion, she goes to take a shower. While she showers, the Scarecrow man sneaks into the bathroom, staring at her. She is unaware of his presence in the cabin. Watching that scene gave Petsch the willies, and now it's all she can think about whenever she showers:
"Every time I am shampooing my hair, right when the suds are in my eyes, I'm convinced a serial killer is standing outside of my door. [...] When we shot it, I was like, 'I'm conquering my fear. I'm never gonna feel that way again.' [...] It's actually amplified that fear. It's even worse now."
And that might be why the "Strangers" movies have persisted. Even a cheap slasher movie taps into real fears, and Harlin's film features several eerie shots of masked killers standing just out of the protagonists' fields of vision, lurking in the shadows. What if there was a killer in your house? What if they were ... standing ... right ... behind ... you?
You can read our own career-spanning interview with Renny Harlin right here.