"The Strangers: Chapter 1" will focus on Madelaine Petsch's Maya, a woman driving across the U.S. with her boyfriend, played by Froy Gutierrez. They're heading for the West Coast to begin anew, but needless to say, things don't work out like they'd hoped. As Deadline reports, "When their car breaks down in Venus, Oregon, they're forced to spend the night in a secluded Airbnb, where they are terrorized from dusk till dawn by three masked strangers."
Major spoilers ahead — director Renny Harlin has made it clear that Maya will survive this encounter, telling ComicBook.com that the subsequent films will focus on Maya's resulting trauma. "This is really an exploration of a young woman who's been the victim of incredible violence and an exploration of what happens to a person mentally and physically," he said, later adding, "Our focus is our central character and her journey and where she's gonna go."
Harlin has also revealed the film will ignore the events of "The Strangers: Prey at Night." In fact, the movie appears to be a prequel to the 2008 "Strangers" and will — wisely or not — dive deeper into the motives of the masked killers. Speaking with Screen Rant, the filmmaker revealed, "Of course, a lot of the appeal of the original movie is you just don't know. It's just random, completely blind horrible violence. But we go deep after the first movie; we start exploring who they are, and we follow our main character, Madelaine Petsch. We follow her through these three movies."
