The Strangers fans were given the first glimpse of what could be next for the franchise thanks to a first teaser for The Strangers: Chapter 2 being released today. Since the early phases of the reboot’s development, fans were aware that the project would consist of three entries, so while we knew that two more movies would be coming, audiences have largely been kept in the dark about the status of the series since The Strangers: Chapter 1 was released earlier this year. Given the lengthy wait between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, it’s possible we might not get Chapter 3 until sometime in 2026. You can check out the teaser for The Strangers: Chapter 2 above.
Madelaine Petsch returns in Chapter 2 as Maya, having survived the horrific attacks by three masked figures. Her and her boyfriend Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) suffered some car trouble on a road trip, forcing them to take an impromptu stop in a rural Oregon town. Once night fell, Maya and Ryan were visited by masked tormentors, with Ryan suffering seemingly fatal attacks. Maya was luckily able to get to the hospital, though a post-credits scene teased that her tormentors weren’t through with their game.
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The original The Strangers came from writer/director Bryan Bertino and was released in 2008. That movie similarly saw a couple in a rural home being attacked by masked intruders, with the figures ultimately revealing this couple was selected solely because they were home. While it wasn’t a major box-office success, the movie earned a passionate following among horror fans and largely set the standard for contemporary home-invasion horrors. The movie earned the sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night in 2018, which similarly featured masked killers tormenting a family, though there was little narrative connection to its predecessor.
Given the nature of the premise and how the first two films didn’t feature direct connections to one another, some audiences have wondered why a reboot approach felt necessary for this project. While Chapter 1 followed many of the same beats as the original movie, part of what set this approach apart was the idea that we would see a journey unfold over three films as opposed to merely getting another isolated experience.
Renny Harlin, who directed all three movies, previously expressed that the whole project was considered one epic journey of terror, feeling like a 4.5-hour movie broken up into chapters as opposed to three disparate adventures.
“We, of course, shot them on top of each other and mixed up, like movies are always made. But we had to keep in mind that this is one story arc,” Harlin detailed to ComicBook earlier this year. “It is one 4.5-hour movie, and the first movie is a first act. It sets up the characters and the terror and the killers and our main character, who will survive the first movie, but then go on a journey for the next two.”
Stay tuned for updates on The Strangers: Chapter 2.
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