Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin to reboot cult classic horror The Strangers

Die Hard 2 and The Misfits director Renny Harlin has signed a three-picture deal with Lionsgate to reboot the 2008 cult classic horror film The Strangers.

Riverdale star Madelaine Petsch and Cruel Summer's Froy Gutierrez will play a young couple who embarks on a cross-country journey to begin a new life in the Pacific Northwest. When their car breaks down in Oregon, they're forced to spend the night in an Airbnb where they are attacked and terrorized by three masked strangers.

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman played the couple in the original film, who stay at a vacation home when three masked individuals break in. Directed and written by Bryan Bertino, the screenplay was based on the Tate-La Bianca murders carried out by the Manson family as well as a string of break-ins that occurred in Bertino's childhood neighborhood.

The movie is often thought to be a modern-day telling of the real-life 1979 Keddie cabin murders, in which Sue Sharp packed up her five children and headed west to start a new life post-separation from her husband. There, she and her family were terrorized and subsequently murdered by two unidentified men. The murders remain unsolved to this day.

Harlin, who has helmed other horror films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Exorcist: The Beginning, is set to direct the first film in the new franchise from a screenplay by Alan R. Cohen and Freedland (Due Date, The Freak Brothers). Hillbilly Elegy's Gabriel Basso will also star. Filming has reportedly begun in Slovakia.

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