If you’ve been waiting for Renny Harlin’s Strangers trilogy, your patience has officially paid off. Lionsgate’s highly divisive 2024 franchise revival, The Strangers: Chapter 1, has officially found a new home on Peacock.
Led by “Riverdale’s” Madelaine Petsch, the film kicked off a massive, three-part standalone saga. They were designed to breathe new, blood-soaked life into Bryan Bertino’s original home-invasion masterpiece.
The Ultimate Box Office Paradox
To say Chapter 1 divided audiences would be a massive understatement. The film was absolutely savaged by critics, currently sitting at a grim 21% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it has a slightly more forgiving 45% Popcornmeter score from fans.
But moviegoers didn’t care about the reviews. With a budget of $8.5 million, it went on a rampage at the box office, grossing over $48 million worldwide. Apparently, people still love watching a young couple make the worst survival decisions of their lives.
For the uninitiated, the plot delivers exactly what it says on the tin:
After their car conveniently breaks down in an eerie, isolated small town, a young couple (Petsch and Hocus Pocus 2’s Froy Gutierrez) is forced to spend the night in a remote cabin. Cue the total panic. Before they can even unpack, they are relentlessly terrorized by three masked psychopaths who strike with zero mercy and absolutely no motive.
Alongside Petsch and Gutierrez, the film features a solid genre cast including Gabriel Basso (The Night Agent), Ema Horvath (What Lies Below), and horror’s favorite creep, Richard Brake (Barbarian).
Shooting a Trilogy All at Once (Without Going Insane)
What makes this trilogy unique—besides the sheer volume of flannel shirts involved—is that Renny Harlin shot all three films simultaneously. That meant Petsch had to play Maya across Chapters 1, 2, and 3, all in the same production cycle.
Petsch previously opened up about the prep required to keep her sanity intact while filming three movies at once:
“I think I did initially go crazy trying to do it,” Petsch admitted. “I took a copious amount of notes, and I was lucky enough to be rewriting the films as we shot. I have my bible book from when I was shooting of every single note, every single page. Basically, I went through before I shot and would write, ‘Scene 91,’ and then I’d write on the page, ‘Before in scene 90 you did this, and this was what happened.’ It was a little crash course in what just happened at any given moment that really helped.”
If you missed the beginning of Maya’s multi-film nightmare in theaters, or if you want to analyze the background details for clues to the sequels, you can stream The Strangers: Chapter 1 on Peacock now. Just make sure your front door is locked.
.
