Although The Strangers: Chapter 1 may succeed, the upcoming horror movie threatens to bring back an unwelcome horror trend from an earlier ‘00s reboot. The Strangers: Chapter 1‘s release will see the franchise return to screens for the first time since 2018’s belated sequel, The Strangers: Prey At Night. While that follow-up largely followed the same formula as the original movie, The Strangers: Chapter 1‘s reboot/remake status is more complicated. Director Renny Harlin’s movie promises to illustrate the origin story of the franchise’s eponymous villains, but it isn’t a direct remake or prequel.
Instead, The Strangers: Chapter 1 will be a standalone movie that explains how the masked strangers became “The Strangers.” This could be risky since part of the original movie’s appeal was just how random and unmotivated the villains seemed to be. The Strangers reboot will inevitably destroy the villain element of the series, although the movie could potentially strengthen the franchise by doing so. Understanding the motives of the Strangers might make them scarier, if less ambiguous, and could make subsequent sequels stronger. That said, one specific change found in the trailer is less likely to work in the movie’s favor.
Early in the trailer for The Strangers: Chapter 1, Madelaine Petsch’s Maya and Froy Gutierrez’s Ryan stop in a small town during an idyllic road trip. The duo enters a diner where the patrons stop what they are doing to stare at them en masse. It’s an egregious horror cliché that implies the entire town is in on some dark secret, a trope previously seen in 2021’s Wrong Turn. The Stranger: Chapter 1 revealing a town-wide cover-up behind the eponymous villains would be extremely silly, as an entire town partaking in a murderous scheme is less plausible than a random home invasion.
Wrong Turn’s 2021 reboot also featured a scene where the young protagonists arrived at a diner and were met with hostility by stern, taciturn locals, and this was an early warning that the reboot’s twist would be seriously ridiculous. Soon after, the reboot revealed that Wrong Turn’s new villains were working with the town’s entire population. The bar or diner that goes silent when the heroes arrive is a horror cliché for a reason since revealing that a whole community is somehow complicit in an evil plan always feels more far-fetched and outlandish than a trio of twisted villains operating alone.
Already, The Strangers: Chapter 1’s risky reboot strategy involves revealing the motives of the seemingly random attacks seen in earlier movies. This explanation could make a scary premise seem sillier and less likely, as explaining that an entire town has been behind the attacks of The Strangers franchise sounds absurd. Both Wrong Turn‘s reboot and The Stranger: Chapter 1 aim to make the simple premise of the original movies more complex and risk the appealing simplicity of their predecessors in the process. As such, The Strangers: Chapter 1 may repeat the worst missteps of that misjudged earlier reboot.