One of the most chilling moments in The Strangers comes when protagonist Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) is tied up by the film’s three masked villains. Understandably distraught, McKay asks them why they’re doing this. A member of the group, Dollface (Gemma Ward), leans into Kristen and remarks, “Because you were home.” There is no grand revelation here regarding why these horrors are happening. No aspect of this ending will lend coherency to the disturbing chaos. This is just violence and misery for the sake of it.
By contrast, the reasoning behind the 2008 film The Strangers getting dragged out into a franchise should seem pretty obvious. After all, to quote Tom Jones, “it’s not unusual” to see horror features spawn endless franchises. However, The Strangers isn’t quite like other horror sagas. Saw spawned multiple sequels, five of those releasing six years after it opened.
Paranormal Activity got five follow-ups over the same time span. The Strangers: Chapter One in May 2024 will only be the third installment in this saga over 16 years. After taking so long between installments, this new entry will be quickly followed up by two further Strangers entries! What on Earth is going on here? Surely, there’s a deeper reason why The Strangers endures while delivering new installments erratically.
To tell this saga properly, we’ll have to take things back to the summer of 2008. “Pocketful of Sunshine” was taking over the radio airwaves. FX was still airing reality TV like 30 Days. And The Strangers racked up strong box office numbers in May of that year. When a low-budget horror title makes a lot of coin at the box office, that can mean only one thing: sequels.
Back when The Strangers was just days away from release, director Bryan Bertino told ShockTillYouDrop that he hoped anyone who had an excellent idea for a Strangers sequel should do it. However, it took years of work to bring the original Liv Tyler star vehicle to the screen. After all that effort, Bertino was reluctant to focus on any follow-ups. Instead, he wanted to use The Strangers as a launchpad into other horror films. He wouldn’t restrict himself to expanding this one universe.
While Bertino was ready to move on, the financiers of The Strangers were most certainly not. Three months after its debut, The Strangers II was in development. Original plans had this follow-up shooting in the nascent months of 2009. Rogue Pictures, the Relativity Media division behind The Strangers, also harbored greater hopes for this sequel.
This studio yearned for this next installment to kick off an endless string of sequels in the vein of Saw. The proposed quick turnaround time for The Strangers II mirrored the 2000s horror hits to immediate sequel pipeline. Saw, Paranormal Activity, and Hostel all got follow-ups roughly a year after their initial release. Even a scrappier title like the 2009’s The Collector got a sequel three years after it debuted.
That never happened for The Strangers, though. Early 2009 came and went. There was no further progress on The Strangers: Part II. It would take two more years for Relativity Media to announce a potential 2011 shooting start date for the project. This is where the biggest obstacle to getting more Strangers movies realized emerged.
This franchise existed inside a studio always on the verge of financial disaster. The same year The Strangers: Part II should’ve been filming, Relativity Media suffered from internal problems and money woes. These issues caused Relativity Media to shelve many projects, including The Strangers: Part II.
A briefly revived version of Relativity Media announced in 2015 that The Strangers 2 would finally hit theaters on December 2, 2016. That never happened. In hindsight, this maneuver seemed like an act of desperation on the part of Relativity. A studio spinning the drain tried to wring some good PR out of announcing the return of a major franchise. Inevitably, this announcement never came to pass. Instead, Relativity Media would be defunct by 2016.
This devastating development allowed other companies to take the reins on The Strangers. The Fyzz Facility Pictures (working with Relativity) took over the property in early 2017. With this development, they were setting up plans for a new follow-up to drop in 2018. All this corporate nonsense speaks heavily to why The Strangers has been so erratic in producing sequels.
Other horror franchises like Saw and Paranormal Activity hail from major studio homes; those domiciles have enough finances to keep fresh installments coming. The Strangers, meanwhile, secured its existence through independent financing. This made getting the cash together for more sequels a bit more of a hassle.
Of course, by 2017, the tide had shifted in favor of horror movies. This adjustment meant The Strangers 2 was more appealing than ever to studio executives. In the early 2010s, one thing that may have made this sequel seem less urgent to Relativity was the popularity of found-footage horror. Countless major theatrical horror releases from 2010 to 2014 (save for the occasional Sinister or The Conjuring) gave the impression they were captured on camcorders or phones.
This found footage approach wouldn’t quite work with the basic concept of a Strangers movie. The original feature was all about masked intruders lurking in plain sight in the background of a wide shot. Shaky-cam and the intimate framing associated with found footage would disrupt that aesthetic. If The Strangers couldn’t play in the age of found-footage horror, Relativity Media was likely less interested.
By 2017, the found footage wave waned, and a resurgence of horror films shot with more traditional cinematography techniques was underway. Titles like It Follows and The Witch were now defining the culture of horror cinema. Making more Strangers movies suddenly seemed more relevant than ever.
The time was perfect, with Relativity Media finally giving up a good chunk of the rights to this franchise—this confluence of events finally allowed The Strangers: Prey at Night to hit theaters in March 2018. Despite the lengthy gap between Strangers titles, Prey At Night drummed up decent box office numbers in its theatrical run.
In the immediate aftermath of Prey at Night, though, no further Strangers sequels were announced. Yet again, a distributor behind a Strangers movie (this time Aviron Pictures) would find itself facing bankruptcy. Another issue at play? Prey at Night’s director, Johannes Roberts, had moved on to other projects (like a Resident Evil prequel).
This reflected another problem plaguing this franchise. There wasn’t a consistent figurehead guiding all these movies. The Chucky franchise has Don Mancini steering the ship. Leigh Whannell wrote the scripts for most of the Insidious sequels. By contrast, each new Strangers title assembled a new creative team. That’s a time-consuming effort that further prolongs the wait between installments.
The upcoming The Strangers: Chapter 1 feature averted this problem by shooting two follow-ups simultaneously. Director Renny Harlin’s prequel was filmed as part of a trilogy executed by the same cast and crew. That means we won’t have a ten-year waiting period for the next Strangers sequel this time around.
This Madelaine Petsch and Gabriel Basso feature is hitting the ground as a franchise right out of the gate. A saga that once had comically long gaps between entries could potentially overwhelm audiences with new Strangers shenanigans.
The behind-the-scenes turmoil informing the odd timeline of the Strangers franchise is quite obvious. What’s less discernible, though, is why this particular horror saga has stuck around. Rogue Pictures had a handful of other horror movies from the late 2000s/early 2010s that Hollywood hasn’t endlessly exploited. The answer may simply be that the original Strangers struck a fine balance between being recognizable and also relatively nebulous.
The trio of masked intruders causing all the terror in The Strangers have immediately identifiable masks, instantly distinguishing them from other home invasion movie antagonists. They’re not quite Freddy/Jason/Jigsaw iconic, but they’re notable.
However, the innately stripped-down quality of The Strangers left much about this movie’s world to the imagination. Further entries didn’t have to worry about stepping into oodles of lore. Instead, they are able to concentrate on exploiting people’s fear of inexplicable horrors attacking them in their own homes. Horror delivered right to your doorstep.
The premise is so ripe for scary cinema that it’s endured as a franchise for over 15 years. Not even multiple bankrupt studios and countless other challenges could stop The Strangers from attacking people simply “because you were home.”
