I love that you brought up the emotional side of things, because I’ve talked to a lot of people who have done horror. And they always say there gets to a certain point where you know that you’re acting, but sometimes your body doesn’t know that you’re acting.
Franco: Oh, yeah.
Brie: 100%, the stress of it all. You’re genuinely stressing yourself out.
Totally. You’re just firing off all of the chemical responses in your body. But then on top of that, you’re also watching a person that you love in real life be in agony. And so you’re going to spark all of those reflexive responses. How would you keep yourselves in check, if you did at all?
Franco: Ooh. I feel like we almost didn’t have time to even take it all in. We were just in this whirlwind; the shoot was only 21 days.
Brie: At the end of the day, we were just so exhausted. We would watch half an episode of “One Day” on Netflix.
Franco: Those episodes are pretty short.
Brie: They’re very short, but we were just about to fall asleep. The show was very good, romantic.
Franco: We love the show. We weren’t stopping halfway because we were bored. We were just exhausted! [laughs]
Brie: I also think this horror movie is unique in that the thing that is coming after us is within ourselves. So, it’s different types of receptors that we’re setting off, right? We’re putting ourselves through it, rather than reacting to an outside source, and maybe it’s easier to unwind from that. I’m like, “Well, I can never escape myself. So, I’ve got to just deal.”
I was talking to [writer/director] Michael Shanks earlier about how I think body horror is my favorite cinematic language. And so I’m going to ask you the same question I asked him: What are some body horror movies that maybe you watched to get yourself in the headspace of something that hopefully none of us will ever actually experience?
Franco: “The Fly,” of course. “The Thing.”
Brie: I mean, this wasn’t in preparation for this movie, but I just keep wanting to talk about “The Ugly Stepsister.”
Oh, I will talk about it with you all day.
Brie: God, I had so much fun watching that movie.
Franco: That’s a great time.
Brie: Screaming, laughing through my fingers like, “Oh, what a fun movie.”
Franco: The final sequence in that film, the [SPOILER]? That’s an all-timer.
But that was my first thought when I was watching this movie with the [SPOILER] and I was like, “Oh, we’re in ‘Ugly Stepsister’ land now. Beautiful. I’m so on board.” The poor person sitting next to me at this screening was just crawling into … I think she fused with the seat at one point because she was so grossed out by all of it.
Brie & Franco: Yes! [laughs]
