The Strangers: Chapter 1 is strangely familiar

THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 1, directed by veteran director Renny Harlin – himself no stranger to horror – is the first in an ambitious plan for a new trilogy rebooting the 2008 original. This fairly faithful reprise of the 2008 original follows Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), a young couple whose road trip detours into terror when their car breaks down in a small backwater American town. Obliged to stay overnight in the town’s only Airbnb, a remote cabin, they soon find themselves hunted by a trio of masked killers.

Isn’t it around time we acknowledged that it’s pretty fucking weird that Hollywood, American institution and, let’s face it, movie sommelier to the entire world has an entire subgenre of horror movies predicated on the simple fact that if you stray even a little way off the beaten path in the United States of America, the locals are backwards, superstitious, brutally violent malefactors? It’s more than a little weird, to be honest, and is starting to feel like a cinematic Freudian slip.

In any event, Harlin skilfully taps into this innate fear of those who may not be wearing but most definitely own a red hat (maybe even the gold sneakers) to build tension through the menacing atmosphere of insular small-town America and its reaction to our impossible naïve heroine Maya and her (ignored) voice of reason boyfriend Ryan. Unlike previous incarnations of the franchise, THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 1 does offer us a veritable line-up of potential identities for the anonymous and apparently motiveless miscreants in the small town of Venus, population 482. There are more than a few likely suspects amongst the weird and creepy characters in the early town scenes and we don’t even need to meet all 482 of them to know that something ain’t right in this rotten borourgh.

Once the couple are in the cabin, the film starts to get into its groove. Unfortunately, one of the main problems is that it’s a very familiar groove indeed. If you’ve seen THE STRANGERS, you pretty much know how it unfolds from here because there’s very little deviation from the template it provides and even if you haven’t seen THE STRANGERS, you’re probably going to guess exactly how things will play out. Sure, there are moments of genuine suspense, particularly in the initial home invasion scenes, where the masked antagonists’ ability to appear and disappear at will keeps viewers on edge. Harlin’s smart use of framing and mirrors, such as in a chilling scene involving a piano, demonstrates a good eye for horror aesthetics. There does come a point where their increasingly conspicuous lurking teeters on the edge of becoming comic and as many moments of genuine tension as they are, there are more than a few where, with the addition of a Wayans brother or two, it could easily tip over into SCARY MOVIE-style parody territory.

Once the action moves outside the confines of the cabin, however, the film struggles to maintain its momentum. The transition to the poorly lit woods lacks the same intensity, and the narrative loses focus. The characters’ decisions often defy logic, making it hard to really sympathise with their plight and The Strangers actions themselves feel contrived and inauthentic more than once. While it was never going to lay claim to being groundbreaking or even original, even for an ersatz remake it relies too heavily on generic horror movie clichés and telegraphed jump scares, which underwhelm and disappoint.

Despite these shortcomings, THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 1 does offer some entertainment value and the cast seem game despite the relatively thin material. It hews too closely to the original to justify its existence, though, and it’s only the confirmation that this is merely the opening chapter of a new, already completed, trilogy that creates any spark of interest in what might come next. A mid-credits teaser depressingly suggests more of the same but maybe we can hope that rather than just rehashing the same apparently motiveless violence schtick over and over, the best scares are yet to come and that CHAPTER 2 and CHAPTER 3 can bring something new to the party and deliver the terror and suspense that THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 1 only sporadically achieves.