The Strangers: Chapter 1

The Setup

A slasher horror film that lives and dies on atmosphere, and where costume carries an unusual amount of weight given how little dialogue the killers have. The three masked strangers, Scarecrow, Dollface and Pin-Up Girl, needed to feel genuinely iconic and unsettling from the first glimpse, while Maya and Ryan had to look like real, ordinary people, making the terror of what happens to them land all the harder.

The Approach

The victims’ wardrobe was kept deliberately unremarkable: road-trip casual, the kind of clothes anyone might be wearing on an anniversary weekend. That ordinariness was the point. The strangers, by contrast, were designed as a study in contrast and menace, their masks doing most of the work but the clothing underneath equally considered, worn and anonymous in a way that feels both timeless and deeply wrong. Filmed in Slovakia standing in for rural Oregon, the costumes had to feel authentically American while serving a film where what you don’t see is often scarier than what you do.