Why did they do it to us? Because we were there…
When Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers hit the screen in 2008 it was a surprising success for a horror movie. Before then, audiences knew to be terrified of ghosts, poltergeists, and fiends in striped sweaters named Freddy. But they didn’t know they had to be terrified of answering the door. So after laying low for a decade, The Strangers are back with a vengeance. This time they’re terrorizing Christina Hendricks and on-screen partner Martin Henderson with 47 Meters Down director Johannes Roberts at the helm.
After narrowly escaping The Strangers herself in a brought-to-life maze of horrors, The Knockturnal’s Nicolette Acosta sat down with Roberts to discuss horror, mayhem, what inspires him to bring people’s deepest fears into reality.
Nicolette Acosta: Can you talk about how you got involved in the project?
Johannes Roberts: I was doing some meetings of the back of 47 Meters Down, and then the producers, I had dinner with them, and they said, “Look, will you read this script that’s just come across our desk and came to me. It had been around for a while obviously, it had been ten years since the first one, and I read it and I was a massive fan of the first one, and I was very nervous about it being a sequel, that’s a whole mind field you don’t want to get into. And it’s been ten years so; how? do people want to see this? There was a whole field of things running through my mind and then I read this script and this is a real opportunity to do the movie I’ve always wanted to do. And I was just like, “yeah, I can do Christine, I can do The Fog, I can do Halloween, whilst paying homage to the first movie which I really liked,” and it was just really cool, so just tackled it that way really.
NA: Having Directed 47 Meters Down, how do you feel like your style developed differently working on The Strangers, versus that?
JR: Yeah, I mean 47 was a very odd one obviously being underwater, that brought a whole different set of skills. I had come up doing very very low budget movies and that kind of really helped when I did 47 I just knew how to think like that… you know, you have Mandy Moore running out of air… I can’t kill Mandy Moore… For this one, what was very liberating was that I didn’t write it. 47 Meters Down and The Other Side of the Door I had written, and you approach a project kind of differently there. With Strangers I hadn’t written it, so I approached it very much more in terms of being a nerd, I can do Christine, I can do Halloween and so I just approached it in a very different way and was very lucky with the people that I worked with. But then more specifically I hunted out people that I wanted to work with like with Ryan [Samul], I loved Cold in July, I loved Jim Mickle’s stuff, I want to work with this guy. And I want to have fun trying out these crazy 80s techniques with the camera and stuff. And it was just great fun and a very liberating experience.
NA: The early 80’s definitely affected the camera techniques and also the soundtrack which is so great because it’s not something you expect in a horror movie. Can you talk about how that affected filming and a lot of the directorial decisions?
JR: I didn’t quite know that I was gonna go that direction. I knew that over the pool sequence we were gonna have 80s music, and I shot the whole movie as an 80s movie, but not to be consciously like, “Oh look at this kind of retro filming”, but to be, I always find that when I watch a good reference picture like The Exorcist III which I think is very underrated, and I love this kind of weird camera work the guy does, William Peter Blatty does, because he just had a very dated filter, which I feel like was very unnerving, and I really wanted to use that in this. But when me and the editor were finding the movie, we did the song over the pool sequence and it just worked, so finding the movie the big thing that was coming across was the car. The car was a character. And I was like, “Jill, let’s have music always coming out of the car”, like Christine with the rock and roll soundtrack. And then we tried different tracks and then we started to go to 80s tracks for all of it, and suddenly the movie became a whole different beast. It just clicked. I would just go home every night and go through my collection, and I’d find stuff like the Kim Wilde track I’d never heard off, and this was great, Wilde singing about Vietnam. I was very worried that people would think of it like oh he’s just trying to be cool, like, “oh here’s Guardians of the Galaxy”, which wasn’t at all that. And it just sort of became a thing, the bit at the end with the burning car and everything; I was just like, “wow!” Its like opera, it’s very different for a horror movie.
NA: What do you think about what the movie is saying, especially coming out a decade after the original, in a new world, now in 2018, what do you think about the setting it’s coming out in now, and what the movie says about society?
JR: Yeah, that’s a tricky one … we have a lot of worries at the moment, especially with kids, and islands and I think there is this underlying anxiety about people being motiveless. We don’t understand why people are doing these things, and it’s happening a lot. There is a real anxiety to that. And yeah, I guess this taps into that feeling. I think what the frightening is, is it’s tapping into the same thing that the first one did ten years ago like nothing’s changed, maybe it’s come around a bit, but it really hasn’t changed.
NA: Bryan [Bertino] talked about how he was inspired by a lot of the Manson-Tate murders, and the crime spree that happened in his neighborhood when he was a child, was there anything historical or otherwise that inspired your love of horror films?
JR: You know my love of horror really comes I think… I’m a big kid, and it comes from Tolkien, it comes from Lord of the Rings. I remember my dad reading it to me, and they are firing severed heads across the battlements, and you’ve got Orcs and faceless ring rate, and as a ten-year-old I was like, “This is f@$king great!” And I love that world. I think the difference between this Stranger and the original, with Bryan he’s very much focused in on real life, whereas I approach horror, I feel like when they cross the bridge, it’s like crossing into a fantasy world, it’s the fog. I feel like I approach things slightly more fantastical.
NA: When you have friends and family watch your films, what’s there reaction?
JR: My mom has sat and watched every one of my films, and I ask her, “what do you think?” And she always says the same thing she says – she’s German so she’s got a thick German accent, she’s like, “Darling, I loved the first film you did.” And that’s eleven movies ago, I made it on five grand, and it was terrible! So I’m like, “Come on, this is better than that!” But yeah they have to go through it…
Give yourself a good scare and catch The Strangers Prey at Night hitting theatres nationally March 9.
The Experience will be live for a limited time only, running through March 9th. Tickets may be reserved online at the link below.
THE STRANGERS EXPERIENCE HOLLYWOOD
Link for tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-strangers-experience-hollywood-tickets-43418514947
Nicolette Acosta is a New York to Los Angeles based journalist and actress. Keep up with her bicoastal adventures such as this one on Instagram: @nicolettepilar
Jake King contributed reporting.