Glamour: With Scream and Scream Queens coming in the fall, the horror genre is becoming popular on TV. Why do you think that is?
WF: I think that's because with TV you get to tell horror stories in a whole new way. With a horror movie, once the killing starts, it doesn't stop until the end of the movie. There's not really any time to breathe in between the deaths or the chases or the scares or whatever it is in that particular movie. But with a TV show, you have all of this time to explore what's happening to the characters that are surviving. Already in our show, we've seen the whole other side of Riley's stuff beyond the gore factor. We've seen the mourning and the different ways in which these characters deal with this horrific crisis. I think that's one really exciting part of it. Also, you get to have so many other things woven into this story—so you have this whole crazy twisted history behind Lakewood, and that's a whole other mystery that's unraveling at the same time that the killings are unraveling. So you get to have, at least with our show, two different TV shows at the same time. You have your fun, soapy teen drama, and then you also have a horror movie—and they're side by side in every episode. I think that's what's going to make people come back every week. It would be hard to come back every week if it's just a slasher TV show. We've got that good mix of teen drama in there to keep people not wetting their pants every second.
Glamour: With a TV show, you get to know the characters so much more—but then there's that threat that somebody could be killed off at any moment. Is that stressful on the set too?
WF: Oh, of course! I mean, we all love each other—we're all actually really close in real life—so we don't want anyone to die either! We're right there with the audience hoping everyone makes it through. But that is a lost hope in any horror movie or horror TV show. I think the best that we can really do is exploit that. You know, like make everyone fall in love with these characters and then at least make them die in really amazing ways. That is the highest praise and the highest way to go is to have a really epic death sequence.
Glamour: So what's the vibe like filming those really scary scenes?
WF: It's interesting filming scare sequences because more than anything it's just athletic choreography. You have specific marks that you have to hit and you have to hit them in the same place every time so that the camera operators can do what they need to do. It's very stylized and very choreographed and very specific. And on top of that, you're obviously hyperventilating and running and screaming. It's really an athletic feat more than anything else. You're obviously scared because physiologically the same things are happening to you as what would happen if you were actually running away from a killer—it's just you don't have the adrenaline going, so you have to keep up that energy with, like, sugar.
