Director Renny Harlin has been talking about a supercut of his new The Strangers films, with all three landing inside 12 months.
We aren’t too far away now from the release of The Strangers: Chapter 1, with the slasher prequel set to land in UK cinemas on 17th May. The film will serve as an origin story to the 2008 home invasion horror that starred Liv Tyler. While horror origin prequels are certainly nothing new, there is something a little different about the release strategy that Lionsgate is adopting for the upcoming film.
The film’s director – Renny Harlin – has confirmed that the second entry in the series will arrive in September or October of this year, while a third concluding entry will be released at the beginning of 2025. It seems to be the opportunity to go into the project knowing that he would get to make all three films that excited Harlin, giving him the confidence and space to explore the story in full detail.
As he puts it to Variety, “if it had been a straight remake or a sequel, I wouldn’t have done it at this point of my life. I have such respect for the original film and am somewhat intimidated by the quality of it. Simply doing a sequel or remake didn’t appeal to me, but this was such an opportunity to have four and a half hours of a case study of victims of a violent crime and the perpetrators and what makes them tick and how it affects a person who goes through this.”
What’s more, the possibility of a four and a half hour supercut is also being floated as a potential theatrical release sometime next year. It’s certainly an experiment that Harlin is interested in, with the filmmaker confirming that “it’s in our heads. This is definitely what we want to do. We want to cut together the full arc. We know exactly how to do it, then we’ll create a movie and see who are those diehard fans who will come to the movie theater for four and a half hours.”
Ii seems that Harlin wants to test the levels of endurance in more way than one, as he adds, “I don’t know if we need to have an intermission so people can get some food and go to the bathroom, but I definitely want to have that event and see if people take four and a half hours of dread and fear and terror and despair.”
Dread, fear, despair and a full bladder? Definitely sounds like a horror experience to us. We’ll let you know more on these plans as we hear them. The Strangers: Chapter 1 arrives on May 17th and stars Madelaine Petsch, Froy Gutierrez, Rachel Shenton, and Gabriel Basso.
