The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) Review – An Entirely Pointless And Turgid Reboot

Welcome to Knockout Horror and to our review of The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024). Now, as far as I am concerned, this is an entirely pointless reboot in the first place. What makes it even worse is that, not only did nobody ask for this, but it’s also coming in three chapters. Three damn chapters, and if the first entry is anything to go by, it’s going to be a painful ride. Updating from the future, you can check out our review of The Strangers: Chapter 2 and The Strangers: Chapter 3 here. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t get any better.

A follow up to a surprising horror hit

I was always slightly surprised by the fan reaction to the 2008 horror movie The Strangers. The premise of the movie was quite simple. A couple, played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, head out to a vacation home for a getaway.

The weekend already starts off on a bad foot after a surprise proposal goes completely wrong. Little do the couple realise that it’s about to get a lot worse as they will soon be stirred by a knock at the door. This prompts the arrival of a group of sadistic masked killers hell-bent on doing some stabbing.

At the time, I wasn’t very impressed. In fact, I thought it deserved some serious criticism for making light entertainment out of the Manson family murders that took the lives of Sharon Tate and heir to the Folger’s coffee empire Abigail Folger. Years later I would revisit The Strangers for my 2025 31 Days of Halloween marathon and my opinion changed significantly. I actually enjoyed it quite a lot.

The random nature of the violence, the genuinely scary setup, and the feasibility of the plot all worked tremendously well. Despite many critics panning it for being a bit derivative, fans lapped it up and the line “because you were home” became pretty damn iconic. A few sequels followed that repeated the formula and, fast-forward to today, we are back with more in the form of The Strangers: Chapter 1.

And then came this pointless reboot

Honestly, I am not sure why this series needed to be rebooted. It’s almost impossible for me to not look at this trilogy without feeling incredibly cynical. After all, this is a story without legs, as it is.

Random killers killing random people; there is really nothing to expand on. Apparently, director Renny Harlin disagrees and thoroughly believes that he has three movies worth of crap to show us. Yay! I’m here to tell you that he absolutely doesn’t have three movies worth. He barely has one.

If The Strangers: Chapter 1 is an indicator of what is to come, you would be best skipping the rest without even giving it a second thought.

Plot wise, this is going to be one continuous story brought to you over three chapters. The first of which we are looking at today, the second of which is coming in October (actually didn’t release for a whole year because of the poor reception this film received, check out our review right here), and the third sometime in 2026 (also awful by the way).

“I am not sure why this series needed to be rebooted; especially in the form of a trilogy. After all, this is a story without legs.”

The story follows late-twenties couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) as they head out on a road trip. After stopping at a sketchy diner in a backwater town, the pair return to their car to find it won’t start. Offered help by the local mechanic, they accept and decide to stay in a local Airbnb for the night. Little do they realise that they are in for a less than hospitable welcome from the local crazies.

It’s more of the same but worse

The Strangers: Chapter 1 falls at the very first hurdle as we spend way too long getting into the story. There’s an obvious need to pad the plot here as this thread-bare story needs to stretch over three films and that padding is incredibly obvious.

Maya and Ryan bum around the town for a silly amount of time and there is way too much canoodling between the two. It takes a long time to get into the action and the entire first half serves to do little other than waste time and establish our rather generic lead couple. We really don’t need to know anything at all about these characters.

When the action finally gets going, the intense, restricted, and deliberately helpless feeling of the original movie simply isn’t there. Instead, we have an extended and protracted game of cat and mouse that goes on forever. It’s very clear that Harlin needs a survivor, so to speak, to carry on the story so we leave the confines of the house almost immediately and head out into the wild.

The one thing that made the first Strangers film work so well is now completely gone. The suffocating claustrophobia of the house, where every exit is covered and escape is impossible, is thrown away. Instead, we are out in the middle of fields and gardens full of hiding places and escape opportunities.

This turns the entire movie on its head with Harlin resorting to the most generic of generic genre fluff. It’s so formulaic and clichéd that it plays out like a game of “guess the horror trope”. You will know what is coming at every turn. Tension is completely absent, the scares are away on their own vacation, and there is no reason to stay invested. 

“Tension is completely absent, the scares are away on their own vacation, and there is no reason to stay invested. ”

It doesn’t help that the villains here feel entirely less capable than they did in the original. They are still omnipresent in that cheesy slasher way but they are kind of bumbling and a bit useless. Maya and Ryan are afforded numerous chances to escape purely so the chase sequences can be padded out even further. A trait that comes at the cost of the villain’s ability to seem scary or intimidating.

Utterly predictable

Earlier, I briefly touched on how predictable The Strangers: Chapter 1 is but I feel that point needs some emphasis. There are no surprises at all and not a single hint of ingenuity present in this entire film. It’s almost as if each single shot was specifically designed to loudly project every potential shock or surprise.

Every scene follows an obvious and apparent path meaning there isn’t a single scare that you won’t see coming. It’s just a repetitive cycle of character running, character bumping into stranger who appeared from nowhere, character engaging in a slight tussle before escaping, rinse and repeat. Even the final moments are easily guessed, right up until the last second.

It is entirely disappointing. Look, I get it, horror is a genre that is absolutely packed with tropes. Expecting innovation in every film would be foolish but it is not unreasonable to want said tropes to be handled effectively. That’s just not the case, here. This is formulaic slasher crap that’s poorly handled and features no bells and no whistles to make it stand out.

“Every scene follows an obvious and apparent path meaning there isn’t a single moment that you won’t see coming.”

The sheer thought that Harlin has had to stretch this, already thread-bare, concept to three movies is seriously concerning. The Strangers: Chapter 1 is trying to squeeze the remaining juice out of a rotten 16-year-old lemon and doesn’t manage a single drop.

Acting is meh!

“Meh”… That’s betraying my Millennial roots, isn’t it? I just can’t think of a better way to put it. Madelaine Petsch, as Maya, does an okay job. She looks absolutely exhausted in a few scenes, though. Not as in “she is acting”; more as in they are overworking her and she can’t find the energy to emote.

They filmed the three iterations of this series concurrently splitting duties between morning, afternoon, and night. That’s a big ask! It’s almost as if you can see her suddenly remembering that she should be looking scared and crying in a few scenes. I actually felt really bad for her.

Froy Gutierrez is pretty bad as Ryan. He is wooden as hell in a few scenes and his performance had both my fiancée and me confused as to his motivations. He has a sinister delivery to some of his lines. Especially when comforting his partner. He comes across as very plastic in a number of scenes.

The script deserves a lot of the blame, here. It offers his character no depth beyond him being a messy eater and easily angered. Cinematography is okay. It’s not a patch on the absolutely gorgeous picture that Bryan Bertino crafted with the first Strangers film but it’s not terrible. My biggest criticism would be how damn dark it is.

Honestly, The Strangers: Chapter 1 is only really going to please series completionists and people who don’t watch a ton of horror. Everyone else will probably be left bored and scratching their heads. Why did this movie need to happen and why did it need to be a trilogy? Just skip it because it doesn’t get any better with the subsequent entries.

Our Scoring Philosophy: A Fair Fight

Horror is a genre that thrives thanks to indie film makers and low budget creators. At Knockout Horror, we firmly believe that every movie that we review deserves a fair fight. That's why we grade on a curve. Our star ratings are all about context, judging a film on what it achieves with the resources it has.

A 4-star rating for a scrappy indie horror made for $10,000 is a testament to its ingenuity and raw power. A 4-star rating for a $100 million blockbuster means it delivered on its epic promises. We don't compare them side-by-side; we celebrate success in every weight class, from the back-alley brawler to the heavyweight champion. Please keep this in mind when considering star ratings.