The first season of Freeform thriller Dead of Summer comes to a conclusion on Tuesday night, August 30 — hopefully you’re all catching up on the first nine episodes via Freeform’s app or website — but before we get to that finale, here’s Part 2 of our conversation with Executive Producers Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, and Ian Goldberg, where they talk about the shocking events of last week’s show as well as what we can look forward to from the season closer.
We also get them to talk a little bit about a potential Dead of Summer Season 2. Part 1 of our interview can be found here; we should warn that if you have not seen last week’s episode, you shouldn’t read any farther as big spoilers are being discussed!
KSITETV’s CRAIG BYRNE: Had you all planned out Amy’s arc to end this way before you had even started shooting?
ADAM HOROWITZ: Yes. I mean, this was actually the cornerstone of the pitch to the series, when we pitched the network for it. The whole idea was that we wanted to subvert these tropes of the genre, not the least of which was the idea that the innocent girl coming to the camp becomes the big hero. What we wanted to do was to tap into the theme of the show, which is about identity, that you could be who you want to be, and take this idea that Amy came and she wanted to be free and be a normal person, when she was actually a psycho at heart.
IAN GOLDBERG: We’ve been saying the whole season how demons are the masters of deception and trickery. If you watch the season again, hopefully you’ll see from Minute 1 when she arrives at camp, you’ll see that Amy is the ultimate deceiver.
EDWARD KITSIS: And we warned you! When Dave the gardener, who everyone just wrote off as the old drunk, like here’s the old man that warned you not to go in the cabin… he said “you don’t belong here.” It’s because Dave was a protector of the camp and he knew that Amy was a bad seed.
In trying to get the audience to see Amy as the “nice girl,” is that why you cast Elizabeth Lail in the role, after she was known as playing such a kind Anna on Once Upon A Time?
KITSIS: We just loved her [as Anna]. She’s such a talented actress and there’s something so likable, but she has such range…. We actually wrote the role of Amy for Elizabeth Lail, and called her and said “here’s what it is, here’s how it presents itself, and here’s the twist.” It’s great, because right from the beginning, when you see her with the tray at the lunch [room], you feel so bad for her, and then as you see her at the end of Episode 9, you’re like “I didn’t see that coming!”
Will we be seeing any departed faces in the finale — people who may have been killed off already?
KITSIS: I would be really disappointed if everybody didn’t get a curtain call, so I would bet yes on that.
Which of the characters was the hardest to say goodbye to?
KITSIS: As a writer and a producer, the three of us were very close with all of them. We were all up there doing the pilot – Adam & I directed it, Ian was with us – so we loved that. We loved Amber. We loved Eli. They were great people. But we wanted to design the show in a way that it wasn’t just a slasher show where you didn’t care about the characters. When the characters died, we wanted you to feel something. Obviously episode 2 was kind of a shock [with] Blotter, but for Cricket, she was the heart and soul of camp, and she [seemed like] the person we wouldn’t kill, but we wanted to kill her first to let everyone know “this isn’t what you think it is and nobody’s safe.” So, it’s hard to say who was the hardest to kill, because in a weird way, it was always designed for that. It’s always hard to say goodbye to them, but the actors all knew. The first thing you ask when you’re an actor on a horror show is “when do I die?”
Might we see any of these actors on Once Upon A Time in the future?
HOROWITZ: You never know. Look, we love to work with people that we love working with.
KITSIS: This was our third show with Elizabeth Mitchell. It was our second show with Elizabeth Lail. Charles Mesure has done, I believe, all three as well. I would say that we could be seeing some of these faces on Once Upon A Time.
Could any characters survive to see Dead of Summer Season 2, assuming there will be one?
KITSIS: Season Two, if there is one, is kind of hinted at. You see in Episode 9 when Deb started to say she remembered something. So for us, if there’s a Season 2, it’s going to take place in 1970 — the summer when Deb was a counselor, and the two will tie together…. We might do a season that takes place in 2004 and someone who survives this year is the director, the way that Deb was the director this year.
This summer gave us two series that were ripe for 1980s-set horror: Dead of Summer and Stranger Things. Is there something about that era that makes it appealing to tell these kinds of stories?
KITSIS: For us, that was a really great time in our lives; the summer of ’89. We loved Stranger Things. I just loved being in that world. We just felt that they did the best, fantastic job, and for us, Stranger Things was — obviously they were inspired by those big summer Amblin movies, and if you see Dead of Summer, it’s kind of like what you would watch late at night at a sleepover when your parents were asleep and you turned on cable. We’re late night cable, hope Mom and Dad are asleep… that was kind of the thing we did. We have shoutouts to really obscure things like River’s Edge and Over The Edge, stuff like that… and I think it’s in the air because it’s probably the way that Zemeckis looked back at the fifties when he was doing Back to the Future. I think we’re at an age now, a lot of us, where we’re starting to look back at our youth. I guess we’re all mid-lifing out. Except for the Duffer Brothers, who are like 20.
Preview images for the Dead of Summer season finale can be found below. Don’t miss it Tuesday, August 30 at 9PM ET/PT on Freeform!
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DEAD OF SUMMER - "She Talks to Angels" - The summer of 1989 at Camp Stillwater comes to a terrifying end in "She Talks to Angels," the season finale of "Dead of Summer," airing TUESDAY, AUGUST 30 (9:00 - 10:00 p.m. EDT), on Freeform, the new name for ABC Family. (Freeform/Jack Rowand)NATHAN WITTE
