Courtesy of Lionsgate
Audio By Carbonatix
Liv Tyler, Christina Hendricks, Lewis Pullman – what do all of these seemingly disparate actors have in common? They’ve all played characters tormented by the three masked villains of The Strangers film franchise.
Starting with 2008’s The Strangers, ominous figures Man in the Mask, Dollface and Pin-Up Girl have tormented random folks in seemingly safe surroundings. What becomes a nightmare for in-universe victims of this trip has turned into transfixing scary cinema for horror geeks everywhere.
The world of The Strangers is set to explode in scope with the release of The Strangers: Chapter 1, which premiered on May 17. The first of three prequels shot simultaneously by director Renny Harlin, Chapter 1 follows longtime couple Maya (Madeleine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez). These two have become stranded overnight in a random backwater Oregon town during a cross-country road trip. While staying at a seemingly tranquil AirBnB, they’re attacked by those fateful Strangers (though Man in the Mask has been swapped for a figure named Scarecrow). Now they’ll have to fight for their lives against relentless random cruelty.
Strangers: Chapter 1 leading man Froy Gutierrez, the latest actor scrambling to survive against The Strangers, was born and raised in Highland Park.
“I grew up in Lower Greenville, I went to school in Highland Park, gosh, Dallas, Texas, it’s such a special city,” Gutierrez says, as his eyes light up. “There were just so many opportunities to learn acting and practice my hobbies and sports.”
Gutierrez says that his endless interests were molded while growing up in Dallas, partly by attending Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. This Dallas institution, founded in 1922, is a space where budding young artists expand their minds and talents. In his time here, Gutierrez anchored a wide array of stage productions. These included The Matchmaker, A Thing of Beauty and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Engaging in an eclectic collection of shows and being around so many creative people left a profound mark on the young performer.
“The whole of the experience at Booker T. helped me grow as an artist,” Gutierrez says. “I had teachers like Karon Cogdill, the whole theater cluster they have over there was really impactful.”
While acting in stage shows in his teenage years, Gutierrez also got to rub shoulders with some famous figures of the Dallas stage scene. An especially impactful instance of this came when Gutierrez snagged the role of Claude in the Booker T. Washington and Dallas Theater Center production of Hair. While playing this role, the young artist got to spend time interacting with Dallas Theater Center director Kevin Moriarity.
Years later, Gutierrez reels over everything he learned from Moriarity.
“He really taught me so much about finding the kernel of truth in art and not just memorizing the lines and doing a good performance,” Gutierrez says.
Moriarity pushed the then-teenager to “connect to your castmates and form a community” and instilled in Gutierrez a greater understanding of the communal joys of acting.
Gutierrez found a love for visual storytelling and developed a love for movies, a passion he shared with his father by going to the movies together every Friday. Such trips took place at “an AMC theater that’s not there anymore, but it was right there next to the Whataburger and the Cityplace Target,” Gutierrez recalls. The building itself is nothing more than rubble now, but the memories they carved out there are intant.
“We watched [movies] together and I’d eviscerate my tongue with Sour Patch Kids,” Guiterrez says. “We’d always play the snowmobile game out in the front, and I’m so forever grateful for that experience with my dad. We connected a lot through film.”
A Horror Fantasy Come True
Nearly two decades later, Guiterrez is starring in a major motion picture. Getting to headline The Strangers: Chapter 1 meant heading off to Slovakia, the production’s stand-in for Oregon. Traveling so far from the Lone Star State provided a personal milestone for the actor.
“Slovakia is the furthest from where I grew up that I’ve ever gone to for a project,” Gutierrez says.
Thankfully, venturing so far from the land of the Reunion Tower was a pleasant experience.
“It was great to experience a new place and live there for a while and try out the restaurant and get to meet people,” Gutierrez says of the shoot. “The crew was great, it was a lot of Slovakian people, a lot of Ukrainian people, and they really carried us through that whole experience. Shooting three movies in 52 days is not an easy task.”
Spending months in Slovakia also meant constantly interacting with the actors inhabiting the three masked foes of The Strangers: Chapter 1. The Scarecrow’s performer “had a slow, menacing march of death quality to him,” Guiterrez says. “He was very calm, collected, always moving like a shark, but very slowly in a way that was like … way too creepy for me.”
Through his role, Gutierrez cemented himself in a long, impressive legacy of Texas artists and backdrops prominent in horror cinema, such as Joe Dante’s original Piranha, Ti West’s 2022 horror hit X and the entire Texas Chainsaw Massacre mythology, nearly all of it set in this location. For Gutierrez, the omnipresence of Texas and Texans in this genre is a shining reflection of the state’s endless well of creativity.
“Texas has so much to offer as far as creative people; some of the most creative people I’ve ever met are from Texas,” Gutierrez says. “It’s just a great place to develop perspective, it’s a great place to develop community. It’s a really diverse place as well. There are also just a ton of people here. Its contributions to culture as a whole cannot go unremarked upon.”