Renny Harlin’s The Strangers: Chapter 1 begins so rotely that it feels like a parody of every bad backwoods horror movie made in the last 50 years. An upwardly mobile young couple, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), are traveling cross-country to Portland for a job interview that Maya has lined up when they decide to make a pit stop for food. Rather than hit the nearest roadside McDonalds, they veer way off their route toward a diner in the tiny town of Venus, Oregon. And wouldn’t you know it, Maya and Ryan’s car breaks down, and since their cell service is spotty, they’re forced to spend the night in Venus. All the while, the town’s largely unwelcoming residents glare at them and mumble about “city folk.”
One diner employee, though, does offer Maya and Ryan some help, pointing them toward a nearby Airbnb cottage (“One of those internet homes,” she scoffs). This, of course, will become the arena for the kind of mayhem previously sprung by Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers, which revitalized the modern stalk-and-slash film through its stark approach to the time-honored tradition of home-invasion horror movies. So when a spooky girl arrives at the front door asking if Tamara is home, it’s effectively our cue to buckle up for a night in which three masked strangers will proceed to terrorize the couple for no other reason than because they’re there.
This franchise’s enduring popularity is owed to the enigmatic simplicity of this conceit, bringing to mind tales of real-life murders that have gone unsolved. Chapter 1, the first of a new reboot trilogy, continues to link itself to this idea right off the top through a procession of title cards, so somber that they’re unintentionally amusing, stating the large number of violent crimes that happen regularly in America (“7 since you’ve been watching this film”). More than that, the signature boogeymen and women, known affectionately as Man in the Mask, Dollface, and Pin-Up Girl, still have the power to send shivers down the spine, based solely on their menacing appearance and ghostly knack of appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye.
Once things start to go down at the cottage, though, Chapter 1 isn’t so much a back-to-basics homage than a facsimile of Bertino’s original, and a faded one at that. The strangers again make their presence subtly felt, lingering in the background and just out of the sights of their victims, who spend an inordinate amount of time wandering around the cottage calling out “Hello?” and “Is anybody there?” (All the while, the golden oldies spinning on vinyl continue to signal doom.)
When the strangers do eventually reveal themselves to Maya and Ryan, the film then becomes the expectedly frenzied game of hide-and-go-seek, hitting all the same beats as the original on its way to an identical climax. Slasher movie sequels have never necessarily been lauded for their originality, but Chapter 1’s approach is enough to induce some serious déjà vu.
It’s disappointing to see Harlin show so little enthusiasm for even the fundamental nuts and bolts of this genre exercise. Missing is the original film’s precise sense of visual geography and all those rigorous compositions from which the strangers would hypnotically float in and out of on the edges, replaced by a far more generic and haphazard visual aesthetic. And instead of tomandandy’s spooky soundscape from the original film or the ’80s power ballads of Johannes Roberts’s fitfully enjoyable sequel, Prey at Night, Chapter 1’s mechanically bombastic score feels transplanted from one of the low-grade action film that Harlin has been churning out for the last decade. A couple of routine jump scares are effective but only inasmuch as a loud sound following a period of silence is known to provoke a physiological response in a viewer.
Chapter 1 does briefly deviate from the original’s trajectory right at the end, with an awkwardly tacked-on coda that sets up the Harlin-directed Chapter 2 and 3 that are already in the can. It would be logical to assume that the ominous townsfolk of Venus, given how they’re conspicuously forgotten after the first act and the suspiciously silent local sheriff is played by character actor Richard Brake, will re-emerge to connect in some way to whatever origin story the filmmakers ultimately have planned. Whatever happens, Harlin would do well to rediscover some of the zeal he displayed in his early-career horror efforts, particularly when he once was brought in to steer the course for another iconic American horror film franchise with A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. But based on his depressingly half-hearted stab at this material, this new era of The Strangers seems all but doomed to irrelevance.
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