[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Pretty Little Liars: Summer School.]
The Big Picture
‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’ kicked off with a bloody opener to tie up loose ends from Season 1.
Season 2 introduced Bloody Rose as the new slasher villain, a female figure of horror inspired by iconic characters.
The creators wanted Season 2 to focus more on the girls’ friendships and bonding, exploring new joys before being tested yet again.
The Max original series Pretty Little Liars: Summer School started with a bloodbath of loose ends, put its five final girls to the test, and ended with the reveal of just who was behind it all. After surviving Archie Waters in Season 1, Imogen (Bailee Madison), Tabby (Chandler Kinney), Faran (Zaria), Noa (Maia Reficco) and Mouse (Malia Pyles) had to face Bloody Rose, who brought a very different vibe to Season 2, paying homage to all the female figures of horror.
During this interview with Collider, co-creators Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Lindsay Calhoon Bring spilled all the details about the blood that was shed, when and how they narrowed down the killer (or killers), what made Season 2 different from Season 1, designing Mouse’s horrific Sweet 16, the Unfriended style episode that didn’t happen, who else they considered to be responsible for all the murder and mayhem, whether the final girls were ever truly in danger, how you should always question the boyfriends, the inspiration for the design of the abandoned church standoff, and what was really going on with Dr. Sullivan (Annabeth Gish). They also teased some possible ideas for Season 3 and what could be in store for the final girls’ junior year.
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin
An intense mystery drama that introduces a new generation of characters facing the haunting legacy of their predecessors in Millwood. A group of teenage girls find themselves targeted by “A,” an enigmatic antagonist who knows their darkest secrets and forces them to confront the hidden sins of their parents. As they struggle to uncover the truth and protect each other, the series delves into the complexities of their friendships, the impact of past actions, and the pervasive influence of secrets.
Release Date July 28, 2022
Cast Bailee Madison , Chandler Kinney , Mallory Bechtel , Zaria , Maia Reficco , Malia Pyles
Seasons 2
Network HBO Max
What Better Way to Kick Off Season 2 of a Slasher Series Than with a Bloodbath?
Image via Max
Collider: After everything last season, what made you decide to start at the top of this season with a loose ends bloodbath?
ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA: Do you wanna know what’s so funny? The original title for that episode was called “Loose Ends.”
LINDSAY CALHOON: That’s true.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: We wanted to clear the deck and temporarily neutralize A. Both Lindsay and I love A, and we didn’t want A to get killed, but we knew that if he was out there, it would be difficult to tell any story other than, “A is still out there.” So, I don’t remember exactly how we got to it, but there was one day when it clicked into place where it was like, “Oh, my God, we’ve got to start with a gonzo opening. There are so many loose ends to dispatch. A’s gotta be caught.” And we thought about a SWAT team. That is how it started. We also wanted to make sure to remind people, “This is a horror show. People die on this show.”
So, instead of canceling A, you just decided to slaughter a whole bunch of people.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: Yeah.
CALHOON: That’s right. Yes, that’s accurate. When we were talking about those opening minutes, Roberto said, “Season 2 is really a part two horror sequel. We have to have an amazing horror teaser. We have to have a bloodbath. We have to start this with take-no-prisoners and really go gonzo.” We had a lot of fun talking, early on, about who those horror victims would be. Who are the loose ends? If we do a direct pickup from our finale, so we can place ourselves with these girls, it’s this long Christmas night of horror. So many of these things happen on a holiday, like Christmas or New Year’s Eve. Who is left behind for A? A has a whole journey of loose ends.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: In the original draft of the script, for each one of those kills, there was a long scene before the person got killed. And then, when we got to it, they literally just got killed. But originally, it was like, “Oh, let’s give everyone a moment and a conversation. She’s stroking the cat and she’s doing this.” But it ended up like, “No, she’s opening the fridge and getting killed.” We were a little bit scared of turning in a script to our studio network that was called “Loose Ends” because they might think, “Why are you even doing this? Start the story?” So, we decided to call it Spooky Spaghetti, but that’s what it was called for a long time, until we published the second draft.
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‘Pretty Little Liars’ expands both its characters and its setting in the second season.
What did you want to do with Season 2 that you couldn’t have done with Season 1? Once you have the world, the characters, and these relationships established, what can you do now that you couldn’t do before all that?
CALHOON: To your point, with Season 1, we really needed to take the time for us to get to know our characters, but also for their friendship to form and for it to feel real and not happen overnight, especially with characters like Tabby and Imogen. I actually just re-watched our pilot recently and their first scene together is so awkward. They’re standing far apart, they’re about to walk to school together, and it’s that horrible thing when you have to make small talk with someone, but you don’t know what to say. And now, they’re such sisters and it’s so natural. So, in Season 2, being able to jump right in with all our characters as really tight friends in their sisterhood also allowed us to push the fun a little bit. For Season 1, the theme Original Sin was so about the sins of the mother falling upon the child, and then having to pay for the sins of what’s happening to them and being pushed together and, quite frankly, bonding through trauma. In Season 2, they are bonded, but they really are finding the joy in their friendships together, which is really fun. They’re getting to talk about crushes and their jobs and their wants and having fun hanging out together. That’s a lot of the joy of Season 2.
Bloody Rose Drew Inspiration from Other Female Figures of Horror for ‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’
Image via Max
When you’re the focus of a serial killer, it’s probably not the best decision to then try to conjure a ghost that’s another serial killer. What did you want to do with Bloody Rose to set the character apart from A? With these nameless, faceless killers that we can’t really see emotion from, how do you set them apart? Was it important to have the killer be a woman this time, partly for that reason?
AGUIRRE-SACASA: Yeah, definitely. A was modeled on Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. He’s not saying much, although A did speak a little bit in one episode and maybe he shouldn’t have. He’s tall, imposing, unstoppable, and basically wearing Michael Myers’ jumpsuit. When we were talking about our Season 2 villain, PLL is such a female-centered show that we loved the idea of doing a female figure of horror. We thought about all the female figures of horror, from Norma Bates to the Babadook mother to Pamela Voorhees to Julia Cotton from Hellraiser 2, which was a huge source of inspiration. We talked a lot about who the villain would be and one of the things that Lindsay and I both were obsessed with was a character like the Slender Man that existed as a ghost on the internet but had also tragically inspired some real-life horror. It felt like a figure like the Slender Man, where you didn’t know if the Slender Man was real or just an urban legend, felt like a good way to differentiate our Season 2 villain. Is Bloody Rose real? Is Bloody Rose a ghost that transitioned from the internet into real life? It felt like, without going supernatural, the DNA of that had some of that element that was also really cool. She felt like an apocalyptic, primal, almost folkloric figure of horror that felt different from A.
I loved episode three because you have everything from the skate rink and the fantastic wardrobe you have the girls in, to the Rose E. Ricotta restaurant with the animatronic animals. How did that episode come together? Why did you want to torch us with an animatronic animal band singing “Three Blind Mice” before their faces melt off?
AGUIRRE-SACASA: Honestly, that’s the joy of the writers’ room. We landed, early on, that if any of the PLLs were celebrating their Sweet 16, that it would be Mouse. Mouse was always wrestling with being seen as a little girl by her moms, so it was like, “Okay, what would her nightmare birthday be?” And then, we thought about Chuck E. Cheese, but immediately, everyone was like, “You’re never gonna get Chuck E. Cheese cleared,” which is fine. We were good with that. That came from the hard work of being in the writers’ room and digging deep on the characters and trying to make all this stuff thematically resonant.
CALHOON: Exactly. It’s that group effort that’s fun. We always ask ourselves so many questions throughout each episode. What’s our amazing horror set piece that makes sense thematically, and what’s each girl wrestling with? This is such an ensemble show that we wanna highlight each liar with every episode. That’s so Malia [Pyles]’ episode. That’s so Mouse’s episode. One thing that she’s struggling with is asking herself, “Why aren’t my friends doing anything for me? Do they even like me?” She’s battling this inner demon while we get to see that her friends love her and were planning this amazing surprise party. The grounded horror of this is that she’s missing out on an epic Xanadu birthday party, which every teen child wants to go to. Instead, she’s being terrorized by a skinless woman and melting animatronics. We had a very fun environment in our writers’ room, but given the nature of our show, we share a lot of trauma. A lot of people have the childhood trauma of no one coming to your birthday party, or you not having a birthday party. What does that look like? Taking grounded horror and making it as heightened and as big and as scary as possible is the thing that we love the most. That’s one of our favorite episodes.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: Definitely.
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Jordan Gonzalez also talks about being on solid ground in a relationship surrounded by trauma.
You guys had 10 episodes for the first season and eight episodes for this season. Is there anything you feel like you didn’t get the chance to do or anything you would have liked to have spent more time on, that you weren’t able to, because of that?
CALHOON BRING: For me, I don’t think that we missed any opportunity for the storytelling and for telling every story we needed to, for the characters and for this season, building up to the finale. Had we had a little extra space, since we started Season 2 already knowing all five of our leads and their friendship was already formed, it might have given us runway to do maybe a specialty episode. Something we talked about that would have been really fun was maybe doing an Unfriended-style episode with the platform of Spooky Spaghetti. That’s really it. I feel like we had the runway to tell a satisfying story.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: I agree with that.
‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’ Showrunners Considered Everyone for That Bloody Rose Reveal
It feels like things were going back and forth between the possibilities of Martha Beasley, Mrs. Langsberry, Dr. Sullivan, even the real Rose Waters. What was the moment you knew it had to be Mrs. Lansberry?
AGUIRRE-SACASA: We landed on our slasher villain being Bloody Rose Waters well in advance of knowing who Bloody Rose Waters was going to be. We wrote all of Season 2 essentially before we started shooting Season 2. Lindsay and I had several possibilities and we knew we had several mother figures in our world, but we kept the door open as long as humanly possible, on who would actually be under the bandages, until pretty deep in the season. I would say we waited until probably episode six.
CALHOON BRING: Yeah, 100. It’s funny, that scene in the penultimate episode seven, with Tabby leading everybody to the murder board of possibilities, that was us in the writers’ room. That was us with every single character, every female character, everybody in the show, doing a murder board and figuring it out. It really crystallized in the last couple of episodes. The beauty of us getting to write the season before shooting it was that right before we went to camera for episode one, we could start laying everything in and tracking everything from the beginning, which was really, really fun to do.
Wes feels like somebody that is a relatively insignificant character until his reveal. Was that always part of the plan with that character, or did you pull that character in because people likely wouldn’t be thinking about him anymore by that point?
AGUIRRE-SACASA: Once we landed on Mrs. Lansberry being Bloody Rose, we were like, “Does it strain credulity that Mrs. Lansberry is Bloody Rose, and then she’s also rallying the Spooky Spaghetti teens?” It felt like those were two separate pieces and that we needed someone behind the Bloody Rose persona. We talked about Christian, we talked about Johnny, and we talked about Principal Clanton from Season 1, who’s in jail. But we very candidly love the actor that plays Wes – Derek [Klena] is amazing – and we felt like, given the fact that Tabby was the final girl, and Wes was always Tabby’s antagonist, and Wes worked with Chip, that it made sense. That was also something that was in flux until around episode five or six. And then, with Wes, we really went back and laid in some track to make sure it felt like the track was laid.
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Co-Stars Baillee Madison, Zaria & Maia Reficco also talk about how gratifying the finale will be.
Anytime you have a character that’s obsessed with horror movies, you think of Scream, and I love how there’s even a mention about how Johnny and Christian could turn out to be a Billy and Stu situation. Is it important to you guys to mention those inspirations in the series since you know the audience is going to be thinking about it anyway?
CALHOON BRING: Definitely. That’s also a bit of our thought process in the writers’ room. We’re all such horror lovers and we’re talking a lot about our favorite horror movies, our favorite slashers, and especially our favorite part two slashers, so it’s hard to avoid. And given that we have a character like Tabby, who thinks in terms of solving a mystery in the same way that you’d solve a mystery in a horror movie, it’s a fun way for us to process that and tell the story.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: Between Tabby and Christian and Wes and Chip, we have had at least four horror movie fanatics who only relate to the world through horror movies. It hasn’t just been one, it’s been at least four, which is great.
That ‘Scream 2’ Poster in the Background of ‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’ Was a Red Herring
Image via Max
I love that you also had Jen questioning whether Imogen and Tabby’s boyfriends could be involved because they both just showed up out of nowhere. And Wes says that it was his crew that build the scary abandoned cabin in the woods.
CALHOON BRING: We like to tee things up with our amazing art department and our set dressing. We have conversations about everything. We have conversations about how we can do storytelling through the posters on the wall. I love that the night Tabby spends the night at Christian’s house, she wakes up and in the background there’s a Scream 2 poster, and that got a lot of people talking and thinking, “That means it’s Christian. It’s always the boyfriend. It’s Scream. That’s our Pt. 2.” It’s just really fun to lay in all those Easter eggs. There was actually a dark day in the room when we thought it might make the most sense to be Johnny and Christian. We were backtracking all of it and making sense of it, and then found our way out of it in a way that we’re really happy with.
At the same time that you have all these characters to choose from for the killer, did you have a list of characters that were absolutely going to survive until the end of the season, no matter what?
CALHOON BRING: We always say our Pretty Little Liars are our final girls and they’ll make it to the end of the horror movie. Aside from them, I think we’re open to anyone else on the chopping block.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: The moms were probably off the table, as well, just to not inflict that trauma. The love interests, for sure, were on the table.
CALHOON BRING: You know who was on the table for a while and we actually wrote a scene to kill the character was Wes. Wes was on the chopping block as an amazing kill at The Orpheum theater, and that was right about episode six. That’s when we really took that time to re-evaluate and think, “Ooh, there might be a better use for Wes than a body drop,” and we refit that story.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: I think the manager of the pizza parlor was also on the chopping point at one point, as well.
CALHOON BRING: I was trying to kill the A/C repairman. We tried to kill everybody.
Related ‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’ Just Dropped a Sinister Easter Egg for the Original Series
It all comes full circle.
Can you really have someone walk you through hot-wiring a car over the phone? When you do something like that, do you have to test whether or not it would actually work?
CALHOON BRING: In my experience, it works.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: We were there the day that we shot that, and there was definitely discussion with what words are being said and whether it makes sense. But we cut out of it pretty quickly. I do remember there being discussion about, “What exactly is happening?” But yes, of course, it works.
CALHOON BRING: I’m actually glad you brought that scene up. I love that scene because I feel like the character of Jen, who is out of juvvie and who’s constantly making mistakes and is messy, is the person who can help Noa in this time of need. You need someone with those street smarts. You need someone who’s not afraid to get in trouble because they’ve gotten in trouble and come through in the end. I thought that was such a fun hero moment for Jen with Noa.
‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’s Killer Reveal was Inspired By ‘Midsommar’
Image via Max
When Tabby broke through the confessional and essentially found herself in a creepy movie set, I was just so impressed with how that looked. I thought it was beautiful, for as creepy as it was. What did you want from that moment?
AGUIRRE-SACASA: We take inspiration from our production team. The die was cast once Dave Ginsberg, our location manager, found that church, which was so creepy and beautiful to begin with. We wanted the Spooky Spaghetti/Bloody Rose plot to dock with the Redemption House plot, and when we were talking about Tabby’s heroine, we talked about it being at The Orpheum and at different locations. But then, it felt like the coolest and creepiest was the deserted, abandoned church across from the graveyard. And then, the directive was, “Give us something that could feel in place at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and at the end of Midsommar,”and they started designing and building that tableau.
CALHOON BRING: Our direction was just that we wanted it to be the ultimate harrowing experience. You walk onto the set of a horror movie that’s the scariest movie you’ve ever been in, and you take a look around and think that you’re not gonna survive it. We have to give love to Bret Tanzer, our production designer, Lauren [Crawford], our set decorator, and Ryan [Vincent Gargiulo] and Jackie [Wertz], our prop masters. They worked so hard and diligently to cover every square inch of that church with Midsommar-like murals of each one of the girls’ tests. They made hundreds of handmade masks to put throughout the church. Our amazing D.P., Stanley [Fernandez Jr.], and the way that he lit it, we were obsessed walking onto the set of that church. Although it was terrifying, that was the set I just did not want to leave, so I’m glad that it came across. It was just incredible to us.
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Things get pretty scary in Millwood.
So, did Dr. Sullivan really care for these girls? Was she faking her own compassion for them, just to get a book out of all this? After that moment, did you have to stab her?
AGUIRRE-SACASA: That’s a really good question. I do feel like we pushed Dr. Sullivan. First of all, that last scene is amazing, but it does feel like we definitely turned up the volume on her arch-villainness in that last scene with Archie Waters. Annabeth [Gish] is so warm and so good and so nurturing that it’s fun to turn over a card where she’s actually got her own agenda. After episode seven, where she had such a great monologue about her son and Archie Waters, you want to keep going in that horror direction, and that’s what that scene feels like. Was she a pawn in our ultimate scheme of great horror tags? I don’t know. Maybe.
‘Pretty Little Liars: Summer School’ Showrunners Already Have Ideas for a Possible Season 3
Image via Max
After their hot girl summer turns into a final girl summer and they all managed to survive that, what might you put them through for junior year? You don’t have a green light yet for Season 3 yet, but is there a point where you start to worry that they can’t all keep surviving some horrible thing that happens to them in this town?
CALHOON BRING: High school is hell. There will always be an amazing horror story to tell. Junior year is iconic for horror. As Faran said, prom is coming, and that’s iconic for horror. Of course, you always wanna go into any horror movie or any horror show knowing the stakes are high and that you could lose your favorite character at any moment. That is something you want. At the same time, in the same way that Sidney Prescott’s been fortified over all this craziness for 25 years (in the Scream franchise), I think these girls have been made so strong and nearly indestructible with the tests that they’ve been through. That’s not to say that anything horrible can’t happen to any one of our favorite characters at any moment because that’s the horror genre, but I do think that our girls are stronger and better for everything that they’ve survived.
AGUIRRE-SACASA: In Season 2, the girls were still very much dealing with trauma. Now that we’re talking about it, it would be nice if, at the top of Season 3, you find the girls living their best lives, thinking that the horror is behind them, before the terrible things start happening again. It would be nice to find them well-adjusted and living their best lives.
CALHOON BRING: And applying to colleges and having a good time. And then, you pull the rug right out from under them. It’s funny, we have to give it to the original Pretty Little Liars, which ran seven seasons with those four or five girls, including Alison. I watched them get tied to train tracks with oncoming trains, and they always found a way out of it, for over 100 episodes. That’s so impressive. We have a shorter order, we have five leads, and this is the horror genre. We’ve had those conversations about how, at a certain point, things will have to get harrowing and we might have to lose someone that we really love.
Pretty Little Liars: Summer School is available to stream on Max. Check out the trailer:
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