At The Strangers: Chapter 2 panel at San Diego Comic-Con, Renny Harlin addressed the reshoots the film underwent — although the director prefers to call them “enhancements.”
“It’s purely from listening to the audience. The first movie came out, and we got a lot of feedback from the fans and regular moviegoers,” Harlin told the crowd.
“We realized that, while we had crafted this four-and-a-half hour movie that we had broken into three chapters, there was definitely room for learning from the audience experience and listening to the fact that the audience was interested in some things that we were not exploring enough yet.
“One of those is the fact that people wanted to know more about the Strangers. We are not saying what their names are and where they live and if they like lasagna,” he smiles.
“But we are showing some glimpses of their history in the movie, which I think deepens those characters, makes them more interesting — but doesn’t take anything away from the fact that these are real people, they could be anywhere around us, and the killings are totally random.”
Harlin continues, “To be able to go back and explore those things that you couldn’t do before and have a little more time with your actors and the visuals that you want to create and the kind of scares you realize really work well and so on, it’s an incredible privilege for a director.”
He concludes, “I don’t call it reshoots at all, ’cause that’s not what it was about. It was about adding and enhancing the experience.”
Producer Courtney Solomon added that the second film in the trilogy was finished — complete with color correction, sound mix, and visual effects — when the studio granted them additional funding for the enhancements.
The Strangers trilogy was originally filmed simultaneously over the course of 52 days in Slovakia, but the additional shoot for the second and third installments brought the shoot to a total of around 80 days.
Harlin also commented on The Strangers: Chapter 2‘s similarities to Halloween II, another hospital-set slasher sequel, which horror fans were quick to point out after seeing the trailer.
“I have to confess that, of course I saw Halloween II, but when we were making this movie, I didn’t remember that it had this whole big hospital thing in it. I swear to God. I’m sure it was somewhere in the back of the mind, but it wasn’t intentional.”
He adds, “We felt it was a fantastic environment to explore. We are going to explore this hospital in some very new and frightening ways.”
Madelaine Petsch returns as Maya Lucas in The Strangers: Chapter 2 on September 26.
Solomon noted that The Strangers: Chapter 3 is on pace to be completed around the time of Chapter 2’s release, so the wait for the trilogy’s conclusion should be much shorter than the break between the first two entries.
