Editor's Note: This piece is all about a sequel to The Strangers. Thus, we'll be talking about the ending of the original. You've been warned; ahead there be spoilers!

When a $9 million movie grosses more than $50 million at the box office, you can be sure of two things: that everyone will rush to make copycat films to duplicate its success, and that the film will spawn a sequel. It doesn't matter how un-sequel-worthy the movie is. If it makes a significant profit, Hollywood law requires that Part II be produced.

That's what's happening with The Strangers, the Liv Tyler/Scott Speedman horror flick from May. By itself, it's a pretty solid thriller, legitimately frightening at times and not gruesomely bloody. It was a breath of fresh, terrifying air in a sea of un-scary, un-suspenseful, PG-13-rated crap fests.

Now a sequel is in the works. But does it need a sequel? Goodness gracious no. The Strangers is a small film to begin with, having just two main characters who are tormented by three masked villains in a remote cabin. (Warning: here come the spoilers ... ) The Scott Speedman character gets killed, so he's not coming back for The Strangers 2: Still Stabbin' (or whatever they're calling it). That leaves Liv Tyler and the three bad guys to populate a sequel, and I can already see that we're heading for Speed 2 territory.

If the sequel focuses on Tyler -- and Variety says "the expectation" is that she'll be back -- then they're going to have a hard time getting us to buy into it. What, this same poor girl is in another remote cabin a few years later and the same thing happens to her again? That's obviously lame. That's so lame that even people with no sense of lameness know it's lame. That's where you start to think maybe it's the girl's own fault that this keeps happening to her.

As an alternative, the sequel could focus on Tyler's character but put her in some different kind of jeopardy. But then it's not really a "sequel," is it? I mean, it's not like we enjoyed The Strangers so much because we really loved the characters. You may have noticed that I don't even remember their names. It was the concept we liked, not Liv Tyler herself, lovely though she is.

So maybe the same bad guys come back to harass Tyler again specifically? They did get away, after all, and none of them died. The problem is, part of what made The Strangers so unsettling was that their crimes were purely random. They were NOT targeting Tyler and Speedman. They were targeting whoever happened to be home when they got in the mood to do some torturing. To have them suddenly start chasing Tyler personally would contradict the one thing we already know about them.

Another possibility is to leave Tyler out of it and have the masked villains visit their mayhem on someone else. That's what the Saw movies and plenty of slasher series have done -- bring the killer back every time while introducing a new batch of victims. But then it's not really a sequel, either, is it? Then it's just a remake. Then the focus becomes the killing rather than the psychological terror that made The Strangers stand out.

A true sequel needs to continue the story without merely repeating it. It needs to take what we already know and build upon it. A good sequel might have certain plot elements that are reminiscent of the previous film -- Spider-Man is always going to have personal angst and fight with bad guys while swinging from skyscrapers -- but it can't just be a rehash. That's lazy, and audiences know it. Sometimes they watch those sequels anyway, the knuckleheads, but they still know when they've been had.

This is where the Hollywood executives' brains seize up. If one of them were reading this, he would think, "I get what you're saying here, but there's NOT any way to continue the story of The Strangers without merely repeating it! The story is self-contained! It ended when the movie did!" Which is exactly why you shouldn't make a sequel. But logic falls on deaf ears when you're dealing with movie studios, and if Rogue Pictures wants a sequel to a movie that needs no sequel, then by golly it's gonna get one. Look for it to suck sometime around Halloween 2009.

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Eric D. Snider (website) is going to beat the rush and start hating The Strangers 2 now.

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