Arturo Hilario
El Observador
Madelaine Petsch is the final girl, finally.
With the release of The Strangers – Chapter 3 this Friday February 6 the harrowing story that began with The Strangers – Chapter 1 in 2024 comes to a close, and audiences will find out what happens in a final showdown between Petsch’s lead character of Maya and the haunting masked villains that have stalked her throughout the series.
After filming three films simultaneously in 2022 in just 53 days, Petsch is excited for audiences to finally see the complete work of this story, which she sees more like an extended film with three chapters.
Recently the final girl sat down to talk about her experience with these films, from filming the three chapters at once and having to jump into different versions of her characters journey, a trusty notebook that contained the key to her character, and putting on the villain mask and letting out her rage.
A quick note for our readers: it’s important to note that while the original 2008 The Strangers and its 2018 sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night share themes and iconic masked characters, those exist in their own universes, and these more recent chapters are their own standalone story.
While Maya begins the trilogy as a victim of The Strangers and having a deer in the headlights reaction to the horror she experiences, she slowly grows from dealing with trauma and PTSD to learning how to fight back and in some ways is forced to transform into essentially a mirror image of her attackers.
In The Strangers – Chapter 3 Maya (Petsch) finds herself alone and in the woods after getting vengeance on the killers that have pursued her since the beginning. As the film takes place moments after the previous one concludes, there is little room for reflection as the ride continues full speed, giving audiences a never before seen glimpse of The Strangers’ human side and showing us who they were before they put on the masks and began their homicidal careers.
To start off, what has Maya been experiencing in between the second and third films? And how did you get into that space in order to bring that performance to life amongst the cloudy mix of anguish, anger, and trauma at the same time?
I think the fun thing about these films is right where you leave off in one movie, you pick up in the next. So like, movie two ends with her in the woods watching something, and it picks up in that exact same moment in movie three. So there’s really no time pass at all.
Navigating her emotions was probably the most difficult part of my job because slowly these pieces of herself are being stripped away from her, and she’s becoming a shell of herself with every film. So a lot of it was note-taking and kind of realizing where I am at any given moment.
We shot all three movies at one time. So I’d shoot movie three in the morning and movie one in the afternoon. So I really relied upon my notebook so heavily to keep me going.
Since you were working on all these simultaneously in 2022, it is obvious that Maya goes through these immense changes from the first scene we see her in to the last scene in the third movie. Along with the note-taking, how were you able to jump around these different versions of Maya?
Oh, note-taking was my everything. I think I spent so much time with these three scripts and with this character in prep. And I also helped rewrite so much of it that I could just click in at any given moment and be like, “Okay, movie 3, scene 49. She’s been through all this stuff before. It’s informed her here. She still has this much to go. Her limp is at this percentage.”
It became very mathematical during prep so that once I got to shooting, it was just a muscle memory for my body.
This film is your ‘final girl era’, final everything to be honest. You even step into the mask of the Pin-Up girl and get up and close with The Strangers. So that must have been an interesting and fun change up to your usual role within the story?
Yeah, it was. I think the place that Maya gets to in movie three is, I think, the most delicious as an actor because there’s such a scope of emotions in this film. Putting the mask on was not fun, though, weirdly. I think as a horror fan, it’s cool. Looking in the mirror and seeing it on was cool.
But as the person playing this character who’s been terrorized by this mask for so long, and that’s the mask that killed her fiancé, it’s a really almost humiliating, demoralizing feeling to have that put on your body. And it made me feel so small as Maya. And I think it’s also why that level of anonymity allowed her to do what she does in that motel [scene] and let out all of her rage because she doesn’t feel like herself.
If Maya were to survive this third film and third confrontation, where do you hope that she ends up as a character?
I mean, as a sick and twisted horror fan, I would want her to become one of them, honestly.
And what are you most excited for audiences to experience with this final chapter?
I think finality. In the first two films, there was no ending. And I think that was tough for audiences to grapple with because very rarely are films made where they are guaranteed another one. So they don’t get to be continued.
They have to have some level of an ending, and then audiences feel really satiated. In this case, there was a lack of satiation for movies one and two because we knew there was three. So it was looked at almost as like act one, act two, and act three of a large film. So in this film, they’re really getting that act three finality. They’re getting that ending I think they’ve been craving for a while.
Last question. How do you feel as this full circle moment is happening and that the work you did four years ago is finalizing, with people finally getting to see the end result of everything?
I’m really proud. I’m anxiously excited. I’m a little nervous. I hope that it resonates the way it does with me. I think people will be shocked by the ending, but I think they’ll also hopefully be excited by the ending.
