The Strangers Trilogy Gets An Exclusive First Look At NYCC

Producer Courtney Solomon and director Renny Harlin joined Joshua Horowitz at New York Comic Con on Thursday to discuss a movie trilogy based on the 2008 cult horror film, "The Strangers." Dubbed "The Strangers Trilogy," the series (which spawned from a 288-page screenplay) will not follow the sequel, "The Strangers: Prey at Night," but instead seemingly remix and extrapolate upon the first installment's events. Pending approval from distributor Lionsgate, Solomon and Harlin aim to release all three films theatrically within a year.

Guests at NYCC got an exclusive look at three scenes (one was released on the Lionsgate Movies YouTube channel) from "The Strangers: Chapter 1," in which "Riverdale" alum Madelaine Petsch encounters (and subsequently attempts to hide from) the three masked home invaders. Solomon shared that "The Strangers" was Petsch's favorite horror film and that she arrived at her first audition for the trilogy with over 20 pages of notes and questions. She will star in all three entries, which take place over the course of four days.

Petsch's character, Maya, succeeds Liv Tyler's Kristen McKay. "How do we replace [Tyler]?" marveled Solomon. "You don't, so we wanted to find something different. Someone who can be a regular person, appear vulnerable, and go through this ordeal."

At the NYCC panel, Courtney Solomon and Renny Harlin emphasized how much the original film's realism impacted them. "What was terrifying about ["The Strangers"] was that it was real," Solomon began. "It could touch any of us." He continued, "It was just three people — for some unknown reason, until today — that just showed up in masks, terrorized these people, and killed them, and we read these stories all the time."

The goal for "The Strangers Trilogy" was to lean harder into the series' grounded elements, with Harlin (who broke through the horror scene in the '90s with "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4") describing all three films as simultaneously "intimate" and increasingly "epic." Solomon especially wanted to extend this sense of realism to the film's villains and Maya's character arc. Rather than turning her into a defensive killer by the end of the first film, he wanted to explore what would push a person to take another life and the emotional toll that would take on them.

There is currently no release date set for any installment of "The Strangers Trilogy," though Solomon and Harlin maintained that the earliest the films would arrive in theaters is 2024. By the end of the third movie, Solomon promised every unanswered question from the original series would be answered — including the origins of the three titular Strangers.