The Strangers: Chapter 1 is the story of a young couple who aren’t married (but should be) who find themselves tormented, assaulted and eventually killed by an odd trio of mask-wearing maniacs.  If you didn’t already know, this movie is an extremely faithful remake of The Strangers, which did surprisingly well at the box office in 2008.  Who knew that so many people wanted to see poor Liv Tyler spend her final moments on Earth trying to survive a random act of violence?  (I suppose it’s one way to get people to stop thinking of you as Arwen the Elf Princess.)

As with the original, Chapter 1 begins with a brief “getting to know you” segment that tells us the bare minimum about our victims before they become the hunted.  Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Jeff (Ryan Bown) are driving across the country from New York to Portland, Oregon.  The reason for their journey is Maya’s job interview.  If she nails it, that would require both of them to relocate.  Jeff is fine with it, meaning that his current job is nothing special.  Jeff is presumably a modern man and wouldn’t mind it at all if his girlfriend makes more than he does.  It’s nice when societal progress is depicted on the big screen.

Maya and Jeff decide to stop at Venus, Oregon, for a bite to eat.  It’s one of those horror movie towns where everyone scowls at strangers for no reason at all.  When Jeff admits to the waitress that he and Maya aren’t married despite being together for five years, the elder  waitress grouses that he should put a ring on it.  Jeff, who probably has heard that dig many times before, is shamed into not responding.  Perhaps he didn’t want to get into how tough it is for Millennials to buy a home and start a family in 2024.  The diner crowd definitely doesn’t look like they listen to well-reasoned socio-economic arguments on NPR.

After settling the check, Jeff can’t start the car.  This is highly suspicious because the car was perfectly fine when they pulled up.  Jeff suspects that the shifty mechanics across the way did something to their car.  Personally, I suspected the bumpkins in overalls of pulling the old banana in the tailpipe trick.  Maya tells Jeff to stop being paranoid and smooths things over with the mechanics.  She knows that they have little choice but to play into the scam, given how they are the city slickers in this scenario.

A younger waitress who was nice(r) to Jeff and Maya offers to drop the two off at an AirBnB in the area.  It’s a nice cabin, and the two get cozy off-screen.  When they’re resting on the couch, there’s a loud knock at the door.  When Jeff and Maya answer, they see a figure who is so shrouded in darkness she looks like she’s wearing Ninja garb.  “Is Tamara here?” the young girl asks.  Jeff says no, and the girl eventually walks away into the night.  If you’ve watched the original movie, you know what’s in store from here on out.

After Jeff leaves to retrieve his inhaler and pick up food in town, Maya is beset by several masked intruders who appear and disappear, coincidentally, like Ninjas.  Jeff returns and finds nobody else in the cabin, but then the trio of Strangers make their move.  The movie then turns into an extended chase sequence, with Maya and Jeff trying their best to not get killed by The Strangers.  I don’t want to spoil things by stating how things turn out, but since there are two subsequent chapters planned you’re safe to assume there is a survivor at the end of this entry.

Although The Strangers: Chapter 1 is an effective slasher movie in its own right, it’s impossible not to compare it with the original.  The two have so many similarities I came up with a list of twenty after only a few minutes of brainstorming.  These aren’t simple callbacks, mind you, but direct references to the original movie’s plot.  It’s as if Harlin took the script from the original movie, changed the beginning and left the rest unchanged.  For instance:

• There’s a prelude showing The Strangers killing someone before our heroes make an appearance.  This expands the narrative to be more than a simple and random home invasion arc (which was the original movie) and sets up the forthcoming sequels.
• Unlike Kristen and James in the original movie, Maya and Jeff are in a good place in their relationship.  The feeling that the former were doomed even before the terror started is not an element of this movie.  In this one, there is no fateful marriage proposal.
• The setting of this movie is an AirBnB and not a home, making Maya and Jeff “the strangers” in the story, with masked maniacs (possibly) being “the locals”.  Unlike the original movie being based upon the notion of random violence, Chapter 1 has more in common with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

From a directorial standpoint, Renny Harlin’s approach to the material is noticeably different from Bryan Bertino’s, the writer-director of the original movie.  Whereas Bertino preferred to scare us by maintaining a cat-and-mouse level of tension and dread throughout his film, Harlin treats the story like an action-thriller.  This is understandable, given how Harlin made a name for himself directing big budget action movies (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) and was never known for his subtlety.  Accordingly, Chapter 1 comes off as an amplified version of the original movie.  For example, the knocks at the door are louder.  When “bagface” chops at the door with his ax, he doesn’t stop after a couple of whacks–he takes out the entire door.  Several of the physical confrontations were so jarring and immediate that they made me jump.  Where Bertino’s movie often worked on what you didn’t see, Harlin’s version is an “in your face” experience.

As someone who has been a movie buff since my early teens, seeing two versions of the same movie is a rare experience.  (The last example I had was seeing the dueling Exorcist prequels back in 2004/5.)  To be clear, Chapter 1 isn’t a remake or rebootquel that contains a few  callbacks to the original–it’s the original movie interpreted by a different director.  I suspect that analyzing these movies will become a staple in college film studies courses, because they show how minor changes in approach can result in a movie that is fundamentally the same yet feels different.  As such, I found the experience of watching the two back-to-back rewarding from a movie buff perspective.  Others may have a “why bother?” response to this movie and honestly I wouldn’t have a strong rebuttal to that.  If you liked the previous movies in this franchise, you’ll probably like this one.  And if you’re interested in watching the upcoming sequels, this one is basically required viewing.  Mildly recommended.

Analysis

Back in 2004/05, moviegoers were faced with an impossible choice: deciding which Exorcist prequel is the better one.  In case you aren’t familiar with that situation, studio Morgan Creek had Paul Schrader direct what was to be a prequel to The Exorcist from 1973.  It told the story of a much younger Father Merrin and his initial confrontation with a demon.  The studio didn’t feel Schrader’s film was scary enough, so they hired Renny Harlin to make another version of the same movie which was titled The Exorcist: The Beginning.  Harlin put his stamp on the project in several ways:  he changed the script, swapped out several of the actors and amplified the horror.  The end result was a movie that was the same-yet-different as Schrader’s, which audiences got to see roughly a year later (as Dominion: A Prequel to The Exorcist).

Roger Ebert, my favorite film critic, described seeing the two different versions of the same movie as “fascinating from a movie buff’s point of view”, and I feel about the same way towards The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) and The Strangers (2008).  The two movies share almost identical plots, to the point where watching them back-to-back (as I did) gave me an eerie feeling of deja vu.  Incredibly, the new movie was also directed by Renny Harlin, who apparently likes the idea of remaking a movie enough to have done it twice.  

At one point Harlin was known for directing big-budget action movies like Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep Blue Sea.  How he wound up remaking a successful slasher movie is anyone’s guess, but his career took a sharp downturn after making his Exorcist movie.  The correlation between the two could just be a coincidence, as many directors have ebbs and flows in their careers.  Or maybe he thought that remaking a different movie would set his career back on track.  Whatever the case might be, I find myself in the same position I was roughly twenty years ago comparing the Harlin remake of another movie.  While this situation isn’t quite the same as the previous one, it’s still a fascinating one.

Deep Cuts

I’m surprised horror movie fans haven’t liked Chapter 1 at least as a fun meta exercise.  It references several films so openly (The Shining, Psycho, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) that I enjoyed playing “guess the movie reference” throughout.

Madelaine Petsch has a nice pair of legs, but honestly, no woman who knows that a creepy weirdo is lurking outside her cabin would open the door and walk out wearing only their boyfriend’s shirt.

The only part of The Strangers: Prey at Night I remember is when Air Supply’s “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All” played on the soundtrack during one of the killing scenes.  That had to be one of the most incongruous song choices in cinematic history.   Chapter 1 contains one reference to that movie, and it happens just before The Strangers kill Maya and Jeff.  When one of them (I forget which) drops the needle on the LP, I was expecting to hear Joanna Newsom’s “The Sprout and the Bean”, which was the song they played in the same scene in the original.  This time around, they chose “The Best of Times” from Styx, which is apropos for The Strangers and ironic for Maya and Jeff.  I wonder if the band will acknowledge this during their tour this summer.

Monologing is such a bad choice, but it’s usually reserved for villains.  Chapter 1 shows that heroes would be wise not to adopt the practice either.  Jeff should have shot Dollface when he had her dead to rights.  Instead, he tries to have a dialogue with her.  Dollface knows that Jeff really isn’t a killer and uses his reticence to shoot her and call for help.  We all know what happens next.  Lesson learned here is that you can’t reason with a crazy person.  You have to take your shot when you have them dead to rights.

Funny how The Strangers love the 1973 Ford F-100.  Considering the pounding they take in these movies, they definitely are “Built Ford Tough”.

It’s cute how the vegetarian Maya gets along so well with her carnivore boyfriend, who insists on eating as much red meat around her as he possibly can.  I suspect that his food choices wouldn’t go over well in real life, though.

As I was wrapping this up, I remembered that doctor George Sluizer remade his own movie The Vanishing.  Not quite the same thing that happened with The Strangers or the Exorcist prequel, but Sluizer’s movies provide another example of how the same movie can be remade and have an entirely different feel.