I’m not convinced that any horror filmmaker has influenced other horror filmmakers more than John Carpenter, whose past work has become particularly influential to filmmakers of today. Recent hits such as It Follows and “Stranger Things” were oozing with Carpenter inspiration, and it looks like the sequel to Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers will be cut from a similar cloth.

Johannes Roberts, who unleashes 47 Meters Down this weekend, is currently filming The Strangers 2, and he says that Carpenter was a huge influence on it.

“I’m in week two of filming. It looks absolutely incredible,” Roberts told Dread Central. “I love Bertino’s film, I think it’s an amazing movie and tonally this movie is going to fit very well into that universe. It has a real strong emotional heart, which the first one did, and it has a very cool retro feel to it, a lot of sort of references to… I mean, I always bring a lot of John Carpenter with me because that’s what I grew up on, but also maybe going back a bit earlier to the seventies movies, from Don’t Look Now to Duel, the Spielberg movie, even Christine a bit, the John Carpenter movie.”

He continued, “All of these influences are finding their way into the movie, but I think it’s going to be a real fantastic movie. I’m super excited about it.”

In the sequel, scripted by Bertino and Ben Ketai…

The film follows a family whose road trip takes a turn when they arrive at a secluded mobile home park and after the power goes out they decide to hunker down for the night in a borrowed trailer. Under the cover of darkness, three familiar masked psychopaths pay them a visit to test their every limit.

Martin Henderson, Christina Hendricks, Bailee Madison and Lewis Pullman star.