It’s been a little over a year since The Strangers: Chapter 1 hit theaters, but this weekend, Chapter 2 is coming. The movie, from filmmaker Renny Harlin, was mostly a remake of Bryan Bertino‘s 2008 The Strangers, but its intent was much different. Harlin, along with producer and “showrunner” Courtney Solomon, was setting out to tell a much bigger story over the course of a trilogy of Strangers films.
Harlin, known for movies like Die Hard 2 and Cutthroat Island, has spent most of his career doing big-budget feature films, but he has also done some TV work, including White Collar and Burn Notice, but also dozens of episodes of the Finnish show Gladiaattorit.
We spoke with Harlin about the experience of working on the back-to-back-to-back Strangers movies, what he hopes to do with Chapter 2 and 3, and how his TV experience shaped the ultra-condensed production schedule.
RUSS BURLINGAME: You’ve done a handful of big IP films over the years, but you’ve never revisited a franchise. What made The Strangers the one where you were going to pull that trigger and say, “I’ll jump on for a trilogy?”
RENNY HARLIN: That’s a good question. I was actually concerned when I first got the phone call from the producers, because The Strangers — the original Brian Bertano version — is so good, and it’s such a classic, I was like, “Do I really wanna remake that?”
They said just, “Read the script,” and I opened the file. Instead of the usual hundred pages, it was like 280 pages or something like that, and then I realized that there was something else going on here. I read the whole thing, and I realized what their plan was, which was to really go in and explore these characters and this world, and make a four-and-a-half-hour movie, and break it into three chapters.
That gave me like a reason to do this, because I felt like I could honor the original film, that I thought was absolutely great, but give myself, and the audience, and the old fans, and the new fans a chance to explore the idea of, what if the Liv Tyler character didn’t die, and we followed her from there?
Obviously, we couldn’t now — 16 years later — take Liv Tyler and put her there. So we had to start from the beginning; we had to set up the premise in the first movie, and then go on our journey. I found what I felt was a real exciting opportunity, and not a franchise.
BURLINGAME: Because this trilogy takes place over four days — was shooting all at once, back-to-back, key to that? On the one hand, [Madelaine Petsch] could have developed a deeper understanding of her character over three years or something…but you would’ve lost some of the urgency.
HARLIN: Yes. I think that the whole point was, it takes place in such a short time that we have to shoot it all in one, just to keep everything…[Petsch], looking the same, the environment looking the same.
We kept pretty much everybody, from the art department to the [Director of Photography], to give the movie a continuity. Obviously the usual pattern is, you make a movie and if it’s successful, then two or three years later you have a sequel…but everybody changes, and everything changes. Here, the whole key to this for us was exploring this character. What if she survived? What happens that night, or the next morning?
BURLINGAME: How freeing was the financial success of the first movie?
HARLIN: It was nerve wracking, because we knew that in a way, it was a no-win situation. At least with the OG fans, they all love the original movie, and I don’t know if I can think of any movie ever that’s been remade and people said, “Oh, good that you remade that movie, because the remake is so much better.” It just doesn’t happen.
So we had to swallow that and say, we gotta make the first movie pretty close to the original, so we have the setup for what we want to explore. We had to bite the bullet, and we felt like it was a risky proposition, and the fact that it worked out well financially for the studio — yeah, it was very liberating.
Besides that, it’s encouraged the studio to give us some more money. There were lingering things that I felt like — from a 53-day shoot of three movies — that I always felt like, “If I could have just had a little more time and could have concentrated on this and explored this a little bit more…!”
So they said, okay, we’ll give you a little more money if you want to go and do some — whatever you wanna call them — additional shooting, or re-shoots, or pickups. We were able to do that for Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, and I think that really gave us a chance to expand it even more.
BURLINGAME: You’ve done some TV, particularly in the 2010s. Did that help shooting on that super-compressed timeline?
HARLIN: Definitely. I had fun doing TV, because I had the idea of branching into that area, and I wanted to learn about it. That was a great experience for me.
Doing a 45-minute episode of TV in seven days, or eight, it was great. I loved doing that. I loved the pace of it, I loved the fact that you can tell a story so quickly, and see the results so quickly, and yes, I think it prepared me for this this challenge.
Where some other feature director might say, “There’s no way I can shoot three movies in 53 days, I was like, “If I can do 45 minutes in seven days, then I should be able to do one and a half hours in 14 days…and then I should be able to do — whatever the math is! — 53 days should be enough.” [Laughs]
The Strangers: Chapter 2 arrives in theaters tomorrow, September 26th, 2025.
