Once Upon A Time may be on summer break but audiences can still go to a camp from the show’s creators as Dead of Summer sees its series premiere this Tuesday, June 28 on Freeform.
Set in 1989, the action takes place at Camp Stillwater. The camp has been closed for a few years but some of its old campers are back as counselors for the summer, with familiar faces including Elizabeth Lail, Eli Goree, Mark Indelicato and Zelda Williams opposite Elizabeth Mitchell who plays the camp’s new owner, Deb, who is clearly hiding something. From the opening moments of the premiere, it is obvious that there’s a lot more going on at Camp Stillwater than any of these young people are prepared for.
At a special premiere event for Dead of Summer and Pretty Little Liars held last week, we spoke with the show’s Executive Producers, Adam Horowitz, Edward Kitsis, and Ian Goldberg, about what we can expect from Season 1 of what is sure to be this summer’s TV obsession.
KSITETV’s CRAIG BYRNE: Can you talk about the decision to have the show take place in 1989?
EDWARD KITSIS: That was a summer where two of us went to camp, and what we like is that it’s the end of the Eighties, it’s the beginning of the Nineties; and it’s almost like the end of one way America lived and the beginning of the modern way. We just loved it, and we loved that the late Eighties was the era of the “Satanic Panic,” where everyone was worried about heavy metal and Satanism, that D&D led to Satanism… we felt “well, let’s bring that to life.”
ADAM HOROWITZ: We also loved the idea of doing a show in a time before the internet and phones. People aren’t staring down at [phones], they’re looking at each other and they can really connect in a way that we hope makes the show really feel universal and [to make it] easy for the audience to get invested in these characters.
Did you have any influences from any specific summer camp movies of the Eighties?
IAN GOLDBERG: I mean, Meatballs!
KITSIS: Meatballs, Sleepaway Camp….
GOLDBERG: Friday the 13th.
HOROWITZ: Friday the 13th Part 6. Friday the 13th Part 4.
GOLDBERG: Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3-D!
So many of your projects involve some of the same actors, and Elizabeth Mitchell and Elizabeth Lail, who worked with you on Once Upon A Time, are back for this. What’s it like to work with them again?
HOROWITZ: It’s fantastic. I mean, this is the third show we’ve done with Elizabeth Mitchell and the second with Elizabeth Lail. When we were crafting these characters, they were who we were thinking of as we did it, and we were so thrilled they said yes and agreed to do it.
Is it true that every episode will have a focus and a flashback on a different character?
KITSIS: Yeah. It’s a show about identity. The thing that’s so great about camp is you could be who you want to be, and we wanted to flash back to see who they were before they came to camp, because if we’re going to kill someone, we want to be sure you’re upset about it.
On shows like LOST and Once Upon A Time, the shows have had unknown connections to each other. Might we expect on this show?
HOROWITZ: There’s a little bit of that. This show has taken a lot of the sort of storytelling we’ve worked on on LOST and Once Upon A Time, but we’ve really focused Dead of Summer to be about identity. For most of these characters, takes place at a time in your life where you’re really figuring out who you are and who you want to be, and what better place to do that than at summer camp?
What was it like to direct the pilot?
HOROWITZ: It was fantastic. We have an incredible cast and a crew that’s amazing. It was a joy to do.
Dead of Summer premieres June 28 on Freeform, and if you’d like to see more coverage related to the show, you can check out our hub for news about the show here! Stay tuned for more interviews within the coming days!
