Madelaine Petsch continues to fight for survival in The Strangers: Chapter 2.
Warning: Spoilers below for The Strangers: Chapter 2.
Chapter 2, which hit theaters on Friday, September 26, picks up right where the first installment left off with Final Girl Maya (Petsch) in the hospital after the events of Chapter1 left her in bad shape.
As a reminder for those who can’t remember, the first movie, released in 2024, follows Maya and her boyfriend, Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), as they spend the night in a remote cabin after their car breaks down. When three masked strangers — known by as Scarecrow, Pin-Up Girl and Dollface — show up to terrorize them, they must fight to stay alive.
When Maya wakes up in the hospital for film 2, she quickly learns Ryan has been murdered. She’s forced to fend for herself as the three murderers continue to hunt her, wondering who to trust and how to escape from this cursed town for good.
Chapter 2 serves as the second of three Strangers movies. The trilogy, all directed by Renny Harlin, was filmed back-to-back in 2022 in just 52 days. When movie 1 received a mixed reaction, the cast and crew returned for 28 days of reshoots to fine tune Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 after taking fan criticisms to heart.
“We listened to the audience. There were a lot of hardcore fans that were unhappy with the first movie,” Harlin told The Hollywood Reporter in a September interview. “One reason being is that you can’t remake a classic without people feeling like you’re doing it all wrong. However, we had to do the first one that way in order to set up the scenario for the continuation of the story. So we knew that it was going to be tough, but we listened and read the commentary.”
Keep scrolling for everything to know about the ending of The Strangers: Chapter 2:
Does ‘The Strangers: Chapter 2’ Have a Post-Credits Scene?
No, The Strangers: Chapter 2 does not have a traditional post-credits scene. It does, however, tease a trailer for the third and final installment of the horror trilogy. In it, audiences are given flashes of what’s to come, including a scene of Maya in a church, Maya vaguely telling a police officer she “knows where they are” and a few flashback scenes that show the Pin-Up Girl’s early life after she was unmasked in movie two’s last few moments.
Other scenes show the Scarecrow viciously hitting someone with an axe and Maya herself donning the Pin-Up Girl mask.
What Happens at the End of ‘The Strangers: Part 2’?
Maya breaks out of the hospital fairly early on in the film, having narrowly escaped being killed by the three Strangers who are still out to get her. She is able to flag down a car but begins to grow suspicious that the driver and passengers are the Strangers trying to kidnap her. She flees from the vehicle and attempts to fend for herself in the woods but gets attacked by a giant wild boar.
After just barely defeating the boar, she comes across the cabin she was staying in with Ryan. She gets water and food and changes clothes and is almost rescued by a stranger — the genuinely good kind — but Pin-Up Girl shoots him through the eye with an arrow before they can escape. Maya once again runs for her life, ripping apart her stitches and nearly bleeding out to death. She comes across a house and moments before going unconscious, realizes it’s one of the men who was a passenger in the car earlier.
She awakens in the home with her wounds stitched up and cleaned. The two women she met in the car take care of her and give back her cell phone, which they claim was found in the hospital, and Maya starts to wonder if she’s safe. When one of the women’s roommates, Gregory (Gabriel Basso), drunkenly questions her about getting attacked, Maya immediately starts to distrust her surroundings again and starts to think she’s been duped. However, she quickly realizes she was wrong when the real Strangers show up and brutally murder both women and one of the male roommates (Gregory, who drove away earlier, is nowhere to be found.)
Maya escapes the home and flees for an EMT truck she spots down the street, but when she gets in it’s revealed that Pin-Up Girl is the driver. They fight, and Maya stabs her with scissors. She starts to drive away but Pin-Up Girl wakes up and tries to choke Maya. In an effort to save herself, Maya flings the car over the side of the road, killing Pin-Up Girl and barely escaping herself.
Just as she’s about to unmask Pin-Up Girl, the other two Strangers appear. Maya hides behind a tree as she watches the Scarecrow and Dollface mourn Pin-Up Girl. They then unmask her, and she is revealed to be Shelly (Ema Horvath), the kind waitress from the diner who initially helped Maya and Ryan in the first film.
Scarecrow and Dollface’s identities remain unknown.
Does ‘The Strangers: Part 2’ Set Up for a Sequel?
Well, yes! The Strangers: Part 2 is the second installment of a three-part trilogy. The first film — a remake of the 2008 horror film — released in 2024. A third is expected to be released either later this year or next year. In the teaser of film three, which plays at the end of film 2, text across the screen reads, “Coming Soon.”
All three movies were filmed back-to-back and simultaneously in 52 days before wrapping in November 2022.
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