Renny Harlin to direct The Strangers reboot trilogy

2008’s The Strangers is a rare horror movie that’s greater than the sum of its parts: It’s a relatively straightforward home-invasion thriller that hangs its entire plot on late non-explanation for its violence, making the whole point the fact that it doesn’t really have a point at all. It’s the kind of clever setup that you can’t really repeat without cheapening it or weighing it down with unneeded mythology… except they did repeat it with the surprisingly solid decade-later sequel The Strangers: Prey At Night. Basically, Hollywood successfully did The Strangers, and then it did The Strangers again and nobody got too mad about it.

So now, naturally, Hollywood is doing The Strangers again. More specifically, it’ll be a brand new trilogy with a “bigger story” that will be “as powerful, chilling, and terrifying as the original” and will also “really expand that world.” Exactly what The Strangers—a movie that gets its biggest scare from just having a masked man walk by in the background of a scene with no musical sting or dramatic zoom-in—needed! That quote comes from producer Courtney Solomon, via a story from Deadline, which says that Renny Harlin will be direct and that Madelaine Petsch will star.

The first movie in this new trilogy is about Petsch’s character driving across the U.S. and spending a night in an Airbnb, where her and her boyfriend (Froy Gutierrez) are terrorized by three masked killers. It was implied, or at least not-not-implied, in Prey At Night that the trio of killers were the same people as in the first movie, but the fact that they’re insisting this is a reboot means we’re probably meant to understand that they’re unrelated masked killers (and the fact that it’s a world-expanding trilogy means we’ll probably learn more about the killers than we ever did before).