The Strangers trilogy will finally reveal who Tamara is

One of the biggest mysteries in The Strangers is whether or not Tamara is a real person — and the trilogy will finally reveal the truth.

The Strangers: Chapter 1 director Renny Harlin revealed the upcoming third installment of Bryan Bertino’s psychological horror franchise will explore the character of Tamara.

“We wanted to take the audience on a journey,” Harlin explained to Variety. “The movies get more epic as we go but without losing the sense of claustrophobia, dread, and the tone, which is reality.”

In the first 2008 movie, a couple staying in a remote summer home is visited by a peculiar woman. She asks if Tamara is home. It soon spirals into a night of bloodshed and murder as the couple tries to evade three masked killers.

But throughout the movie, Tamara never materializes into something real or explained. The Strangers: Prey at Night follows the same pattern: an unmasked Dollface asks a family if Tamara’s home before being ushered away. The family then becomes the three masked killers’ next target.

With The Strangers: Chapter 1, serving as the start of a new trilogy, there’s room for Tamara to be explored. Producer Courtney Soloman said that once they acquired the rights to the movies, they had a bigger story to tell.

“In order to tell it you’re gonna need to go back to the great original,” he said. “It’s the primal nature of the original concept, these three random people and unexplained, random acts of violence, which is just so terrifying and real. I don’t know if you can improve upon that, so why don’t we take that basic premise as a starting point and modify it for a bigger story that becomes proper, character-driven horror. You need to spend time with both protagonists and antagonists, so I went off and came up with what ended up being a 285-page script.”

For many, Tamara was simply a ruse. It allowed the killers to interact with their next victims and play a morbid game. But one fan on X/Twitter said, “Oh… I guess I never considered that Tamara was a real person and not just something they said to see if anyone was there. Interesting.”

The Strangers: Chapter 1 will be released in May, with the two sequels also scheduled to be released in 2024. For now, you can check out other horror movies to watch.