Writer-director JT Mollner’s Strange Darling is one of the best American genre films of recent years, an electrifying thriller that’s in the same league as John Carpenter’s Halloween, the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs when it comes to reinventing old traditions and making them seem startlingly new. It’s a film best enjoyed unprepared, as its surprises – of which there are many – are among its greatest pleasures, but it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the film takes the “final girl” convention of slasher films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th and breathes exciting new life into it.

“I thought, what can we do with the last girl to give her more depth?” Mollner said on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “That exposes layers of her psyche and shows us a little more? I started to get really interested in archetypes from my favorite genre films, like ‘Duel.’ I didn’t want to do a traditional serial killer film, even though I love those films, just like I don’t want to do a gangster film because there’s already ‘Goodfellas,’ right?”

Mollner found the key was to begin his film where most other horror films end, with the image of the final girl running through the woods to escape her killer. From there, he pieced the story together in a disorganized fashion, so the audience experiences it in chapters that are not arranged chronologically. “I knew the characters would be compelling enough if we arranged these scenes in the right order, but narratively it was boring and conventional,” Mollner said. “The story was all about the reordering of these chapters and the discovery, and that was always done very consciously.”

Asked if he ever put the film together in the right order just for fun, Mollner says he didn’t, but someone else did during post-production — without his involvement. “It’s funny, when I pitched the film in the beginning, everyone liked the non-linear structure, and we got the green light for that structure,” Mollner said. “But when we had a director’s cut and turned it in, there were a few people at the studio who were distrustful of that form. They thought it was confusing and the audience wouldn’t understand, and they thought they were trying to protect the film — they were trying to protect me.”

Mollner didn’t yet have a final cut for “Strange Darling,” and although he believed people would have no trouble understanding it, he agreed to be a team player when executives said they wanted to put the film in the right order and see how it went down. “I watched both versions and of course it turned out the way I imagined it,” Mollner said. “For me it was unbearable. It was boring. Luckily we tested the non-linear version and no one in the audience had any trouble following it.” After that, financiers gave Mollner the final cut and he was able to finish the film his way. “For better or worse, the film you saw is the film I wanted to show you.”

This film, in addition to all its other strengths, is visually stunning thanks to the work of cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, who is best known as an actor but makes a spectacular film debut as a cinematographer with Strange Darling. Mollner first met Ribisi at a dinner celebrating the American Society of Cinematographers awards ceremony, where he asked Ribisi to act in one of his films and was surprised by Ribisi’s response.

“He said, ‘You know what? I’m really interested in making movies,'” Mollner said. Ribisi showed Mollner the studio he had built, and the two filmmakers bonded over their shared passion for celluloid, and soon they were introducing each other to filmmakers who inspired them. By the time they arrived at “Strange Darling,” they had a shared vocabulary that allowed them to create meticulous, structured 35mm images on a tight budget and schedule — despite it being a typically chaotic and difficult independent shoot, the film never seems to stretch its resources.

Together, Ribisi and Mollner developed a look that achieved maximum emotional impact through an expressive use of color reminiscent of films like Ingmar Bergman’s “Screams and Whispers” or David Cronenberg’s “The Lovebirds.” “Realism used to be very important to me,” Mollner said. “Now I just want to express how I feel when I’m making the film, and Giovanni was very fond of that, too.” Because Ribisi owns much of his own equipment, he and Mollner were able to prepare with a level of care that is rare for an independent film.

“We were able to do as many tests as Scorsese probably did in the months before ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,'” Mollner said. “That’s not something you usually do on smaller films like ours. Usually you get two days at Panavision or something, and that’s it. We spent weeks setting up the shooting schedules for the film, which is how I like to work, and I was really happy that he liked to work that way, too. And then of course you go into production and you have to jump back and forth and turn around, but we planned the film really carefully and didn’t overshoot. And I’m very proud of what we did.”