SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains massive spoilers for the ending of The Strangers: Chapter 3. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
The Strangers: Chapter 3 brings an end to what is most definitely a traumatic journey for Madelaine Petsch’s Maya Lucas. At the start of the journey, she’s a young woman with a loving boyfriend and an exciting job opportunity ahead of her… but that’s before she gets to know Scarecrow, Dollface, and Pin-Up Girl, and her life becomes filled with violence and viscera (and a wild boar attack). It all leads to a climactic showdown between the final girl and the hooded hulk in the third act of the third movie, and according to Petsch, her character’s choices in the moment are meant to be perceived as anything but clear.
As captured in the video above, I had the chance to interview the actress last month during the virtual press day for The Strangers: Chapter 3, and my final question was a spoiler-filled inquiry about the film’s climax. In the scene, Maya unmasks Scarecrow (finally revealing him to be Gabriel Basso’s Gregory) and ends up stabbing him to death, but when speaking about the character’s frame of mind, Petsch explained that her intentions are definitely meant to be interpreted as ambiguous:
I mean, honestly, what's funny about that scene is I think Maya walks into that and doesn't know what she's gonna do. I think there's a chance where she stays with him and they go and they do this together because there's, from movie one, if you go back and watch it, and when you do see the full three act film, you see this magnetism that between them, that they're all the time drawn to each other.
(When she says the “full three act film,” she is discussing the super cut edit of The Strangers trilogy that is in the works and combines all three chapters into a three hour and 45 minute feature that includes an intermission.)
The Strangers is a unique series that was allowed to set up the chemistry Madelaine Petsch mentions by nature of the way that the movies were made. While it can take years and years to produce a horror trilogy, the filmmakers all along not knowing if a sequel will be made, all three movies in this case were shot together, and that gave director Renny Harlin and screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland the chance to seed certain details in Chapter 1 that wouldn’t blossom until Chapter 3. She continued,
Even when the first moment he looks her in the eye and 'Nights In White Satin' plays, you just see this like weird recognition that he sees something in her that she doesn't see yet. And he's trying to chase that out of her [in] all three films. It's like a game he's playing with her. I think everything is calculated from him, and the only time he's not calculated is that last scene. And he has full control there, but he is letting her decide who she wants to become.
The door is clearly open at the end of The Strangers: Chapter 3 for Maya to join forces with Scarecrow and help him continue his slaughtering of outsiders who visit Venus, Oregon. You may think that she closes that door by first stabbing Scarecrow and then hacking at him with an axe, but Madelaine Petsch isn’t entirely convinced that she walks away at the end of the film with the violence in her put to bed:
I think that's really, it's a kind of delicious and rotten ending honestly. But I like that. I do think she has no idea what she's gonna do and I think ultimately, even though she makes the decision she does, that doesn't mean that she's going to go and be a vigilante now or be a good person. You know, she might, she might not. She might choose to join them.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 is now playing in theaters.
