“We wanted to always avoid making it seem cheap, or unrealistic, or cheesy,” director Renny Harlin said

The 2008 horror movie The Strangers, starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, written and directed by Bryan Bertino, has been reimagined in a trilogy of films, starring Riverdale alum Madelaine Petsch. With The Strangers: Chapter 1 now in theatres, directed by Renny Harlin, Petsch admitted it was an intimidating move to lead three films based on a movie she loves.

“I was incredibly intimidated by the IP because I loved it so much and I know it is one of those cult classics, … everybody who loves that movie loves that movie,” Petsch told Yahoo. “I knew that it was really important that we did it justice and at first I was like, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t touch this. It’s too perfect to me.’ Then I was like, look if anybody should do it, it should be somebody who cares about it.”

“I was really lucky to work with somebody like Renny Harlin and [producer] Courtney Solomon, who made this film, and Lionsgate, who were so open to collaboration and let me kind of come in and rewrite these movies with them, and become a producer really quickly. I think they could just tell how much I cared about the original. I’ve watched a lot of horror films in my day, but it was kind of the only and first one that stuck with me to such an extreme degree, because it feels so real. And it was really important to me that we didn’t flub that.”

What is ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ about?

Maya (Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) have been dating for five years and are driving to Portland, Oregon where Maya is set to interview for a job at an architecture firm. They stop at a small town of 468 people, Venus, Oregon, to eat at a diner, but when they get back to their car it won’t start up again.

That leaves Maya and Ryan stuck in this small town overnight, in a cabin a local has setup as an AirBnb, while they wait for their car to be fixed.

Things quickly take a turn when three masked strangers appear at the remote home.

While this is a trilogy being released one at a time, they weren’t shot in order, meaning the actors were jumping around in their work. Additionally, there was the added challenge of there being a bit of a time crunch to get these movies made with Petsch’s schedule.

“The first scene I shot of the movies was the first scene in movie two,” Petsch shared. “So I was like, f**k let’s go, I’ve got to strap in.”

“How I looked at it then was this is one big movie that we’ve broken up into three chapters. … Also, I had a lot of notes and I spent a lot of time with the filmmakers, making sure that we knew exactly what was happening in those moments. Because we also didn’t have a ton of time to do a million takes for each scene. I had to be back on a show I was on so I couldn’t just keep going if we ran over. I had to be out and back in Vancouver in 52 days.”

But for Harlin, his goal is to eventually allow the audience to watch the three films back-to-back, one long movie.

“I’m almost guaranteeing it that Lionsgate will let me do it, once all the three movies have come out,” he said. “Then we can call it the director’s cut, or we can call it whatever, but we can quite easily cut the three movies together so that it becomes one movie.”

“That would be the true test of the horror aficionado, who can go there and sit through four and a half hours of constant terror.”

‘The movie should have a constant feeling of dread’

While the instinct for many is to put a horror movie on a scale of terror based on shocks and jump scares, Harlin took a different approach for The Strangers: Chapter 1.

“My number one goal was that the movie should have a constant feeling of dread, that it just feels stressful and tense, and it’s not about the jump scares,” Harlin said. “Of course there are those too, … but we really tried to avoid those as much as possible so that the movie is not exactly what you expect.”

“We lead you a certain way and then we might go back in another way and not give you the payoff that you might traditionally expect. I’d much rather make things just feel extremely creepy and distressing, instead of just having jumpy things come out of every closet.”

At the core for Harlin was trying to ground all these films in reality.

“We wanted to always avoid making it seem cheap, or unrealistic, or cheesy,” Harlin said. “Anybody can just go ‘boo’ to the camera all the time, you tend to react to that, but that is kind of cheap scares and we wanted to try to stay away from those.”

That also came down to the sound design, with the director having very specific ideas about what this world should sound like.

“I really put the sound designers through the wringer because I said, the house, it’s not a haunted house by any means, it’s a completely realistic house, but every house has its spirit,” Harlin explained. “We worked days and days and days and days, just creating basically the spirit of the house. And it’s subliminal, I don’t want anybody to go like, ‘Oh yeah I remember when that floorboard creaked.'”

“We were pretty sparse in many places with music, just playing the sounds of the place. And the forest, it was full of birds and it just sounded like any forest. And I said, kill the birds. The only bird that you might hear is in the distance. … There was a little bit of wind, but I said, ‘Where’s the sound of the tree trunks?’ When you have this kind of a forest with these kinds of narrow, skinny, barren trees, … they are so close to each other that sometimes their trunks touch each other, and there’s this weird, almost kind of a reverb thing.”

‘I was genuinely scared of them’

But in terms of the real threats of the story, the masked Strangers, Petsch was even terrified of them on set.

“Walking into this I had no idea what I was getting myself into when it came to the three people who played Strangers, and I cannot tell you enough how lucky we were with these people,” Petsch said. “They’ve all got such unique personalities that come through so clearly with masks on, which is such a crazy thing to be able to do as an actor.”

“They also were very respectful and understanding of the people who weren’t meant to be a part of their group. They didn’t fraternize with them. They were like, we’re going to do our own thing so that when you see us, it’s time to go. So I was genuinely scared of them. It was a good dynamic for this kind of a film. The shower scene, in particular, has haunted me in my personal hygiene life, for sure.”