It's been ten long years, but the masked slashers known as The Strangers are finally headed back to theaters in The Strangers: Prey at Night. Despite critical acclaim and box office success, the sequel to Brian Bertino's 2008 film languished in development hell for years, even though the script was already on the page. But now, a decade later, the trio of extra-creepy killers are back in action with a revamped take at the hands of 47 Meters Down helmer Johannes Roberts, who's bringing a retro throwback vibe to the newly-revived horror franchise with his love letter to John Carpenter and horror cinema of the 1970s.
For the sequel, the Strangers get an expanded playground and head to a vacation retreat mobile home park, where a family in crisis stops in for the night and comes face-to-face with the murderous masked madmen. A bitter, isolated teenager about to be shipped off to boarding school (Bailee Madison), her all-American brother (Lewis Pullman), and her weary parents (Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson) -- in the tradition of the first film, they're already frayed and frazzled when they come up against the Strangers, with underpinning of drama that fuels the horrors about to unfold.
Last summer, I had the opportunity to see Roberts -- and Baghead -- in action on the set of Prey at Night on a cold night in Kentucky. I've been on a lot of horror sets over the years and they're usually not very scary, but in the quiet dead of night on the freshly constructed, convincingly abandoned mobile home location, nothing but the sound of bugs and the light of fireflies, it was pretty darn easy to let a chill slip up your spine. Especially when you turned the corner to signs of chaos; a minivan crashed into a mobile home, or a big ass truck looming down the road with a masked assailant inside. In addition to getting creeped out, I also spoke with the cast and crew, and learned quite a bit about what to expect from the long-awaited horror sequel. Check out the highlights below.
- The creative team brought in 22 mobile homes and a dozen motorhomes to build the resort from scratch. All that existed before they got there was the roads; they added every structure, lamp post and gravel path to build an immersive, interactive location.
- The property belonged to the airport -- they had to buy out the homeowners in order to expand -- which means that planes would fly overhead at all hours of the day. Surprisingly this wasn't a huge impediment for the production team, who learned pretty quickly to time takes around the overhead traffic.
- The location also adds a new dynamic of terror to the film -- a sprawling sense of uncertainty around every corner. "In the first movie they were in a house and obviously they couldn't get in their car because it was there, and there were no landlines," said Madison. "But we're dealing with the same situations except we are dropped in a maze of a world where everywhere they turn could be a place that they could be, and there is no way out. Which is almost more terrifying, because you're in an outdoor space, and you're not in the comfort of your home, you don't know things, and you're not aware where the twists and turns can come."
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- For the sequel script, they didn't deviate much from the script worked on by Bertino and Ben Ketai (The Forest).
- Madison describes her character, Kinsey, as a serious minded teenager who marches to her own beat and has a strained relationship with her family. "When we first meet her you can tell that she's very disconnected to her family," She explained. "But the internal pain that she has is far worse because she wants to be connected, she wants to feel loved, she wants to be the good daughter."
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- As for the parents, the mom is the one running the show. Pullman explained, "Cindy is definitely the spear-header of the family, and she has a lot of the control. She's kind of the puppeteer within there even though at times she finds its out of her hands."
- And finally, that leaves the dad -- a high-spirited man child who shares his son's frustration with the family squabbles. "Martin's character is definitely... he's a little bit of a kid in a grown man's body," Pullman said. " know there are some lines where it's kind of revealed that they weren't expecting the job of parenthood to be so difficult. He's playful, you know? He definitely has more of a childish tendency than Christina's character. He's constantly going back and forth between being a father figure and wanting to be a kid with his kids."
- As for the Strangers themselves, they are... well, they're strangers, so they'll still be a mystery, but Pullman says we get to see a lot more of them in action this time around. "It's definitely a feast when it comes to the Strangers. It's a lot. you get to know the strangers a little bit more. It's in no way over-revealing, there's no overexposure. So you don't lose that fear of "who are they?" They definitely remain strangers, but you're given more to start to put together, so in that way it's definitely a pretty ripe cousin to the first one."
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- For Roberts, there's a fourth stranger in Prey at Night -- the truck, which is a focal point of a lot of the film's action. The director invoked 1970s horror films like Christine, and less so The Car, as influences as to how he's approaching an iconic horror vehicle.
- Keep an eye on the truck's license plates -- they're an exact replica of the ones in the original film.
- The truck is getting into some pretty serious action scenes, including being engulfed in flames as it chases down poor Kinsey. Stunt Coordinator Cal Johnson talked about prepping for the scene. "We did a fire test on one of the truck so see the speed we could go to keep the fire lit so it wouldn't blow down, or not fast enough to where we'd cook and charcoal me inside. So, we found a good optimal speed for that. The flames we had were about 18 feet tall, coming off the sides, the roof. So we're going to cut it down, because it's more manageable that way. I was burning for a minute and a half, which is a real long burn." But don't worry -- they're pros and safety experts, and Johnson was riding inside the truck with full protective gear as if he was going to do a fire gag on himself. "Tomorrow night, we're going to light it on fire and chase Bailee down the street," he said with a laugh. "We'll be able to put her in there real close to the fire and drift circles around her."
- That kind of stunt work means they had to source a whole lot of classic trucks. The team took to Craigslist, message boars, and all kinds of avenues to find all the big vintage trucks they needed, and they found them in all kinds of conditions. Johnson explained, " I told them when we first landed that we were going to go through a lot of vehicles, and I don't think they fully grasped how many vehicles we're going to go through, but yeah, the wear and tear on them is just extreme. We have to have different vehicles for the different things. Like the hero truck is one that has good drifting and pickup speed, good driving, the second one drives okay, but that's the one we're doing all the crashing there, so the last one ... The hero truck is the one that we want to do, be able to do most of the fire stuff with. It drove the best, it handles the best as far as maneuverability and stuff that we need."
The Strangers: Prey at Night arrives in theaters on March 9.