The Girl in the Woods: Reed Diamond professes his love of the horror genre

The Girl in the Woods star Reed Diamond talks about his love of the genre

1428 ELM: Especially with horror, you need that human element to make horror successful. I know you’ve done a lot of different stuff in this genre. I remember watching you on The Purge. What attracts you to this genre, and do you have any particular favorites as a fan?

REED: My daughter guides all of my viewing habits. I don’t think I’ve chosen what we’ve watched in like ten years. She, from very early on, loved horror. It’s in the blood. I spent every weekend of my middle school years building a haunted house in my bedroom in Manhattan and having other people’s parents coming through. For a while, I wanted to become a horror makeup artist. As a kid in the ’70s, every amusement park or boardwalk had multiple haunted houses that you would go through. I was always drawn to that, and somehow that DNA passed onto my daughter.

She, at a very early age, was able to handle more intense things. I remember some fourth-graders still hadn’t seen Harry Potter, but she’s watching Harry Potter. She loved the dementors from the beginning. She and I have been on a quest to find more intense horror shows where the mythology really holds up. My biggest pet peeve, if you’re going to do a zombie show, if they start slow zombies, they’ve got to stay slow zombies. They can’t suddenly become fast zombies. You want that [mythology] to go through.

We just watched Carrie last night. Sissy Spacek is just beyond. Her performance. I remember reading that book at my daughter’s age, at 13 and fell in love with it. I’ve been showing her things that were compelling to me as a kid. But then some of them hold up, and some of them don’t, since obviously, things have gotten so much more extreme.

I remember going to see The Exorcist when I was in college. I went with a friend who was like a football quarterback, and we left the theater, and he was like, “You’ve got to come sleep in my room tonight I can’t sleep alone.”

My favorite of all time is a cross-genre, the first Alien. It’s so amazing. You think you’re going into sci-fi, but no, it’s a horror movie set in space. The tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream,” is that idea of being trapped. You’re trapped on this finite ship, and you’re a long way from going anywhere where you can breathe, or land, or survive, and you’re stuck here with this formidable beast.

I’ve always been drawn to horror. My father used to work at a local television station in New York, and they were the station that played all of the old movies at night. This was before VCRs, and on my birthday, he would bring home a projector, and they would have the actual 35mm prints they would show at the television station of whatever horror movie we wanted to watch for my birthday that year. When I was younger, I wanted to see all the classic monster movies, so he’d bring Frankenstein or King Kong or The Mummy, or whatever we were going to watch that year.

I’ve always been a fan, and I recently saw an amazing one because I’m always scared of pure evil. There’s that movie that just came out in 2020 called The Dark and the Wicked. It’s terrifying! But it’s the opposite of [The Girl in the Woods]. Because what I love about our show is its got that Buffy thing to it. You’ve got the horror, but you’ve got the humor.

And because the characters are so fleshed out, the humor lands, and you’re attracted to them. It’s similar to what they’ve been able to do with Stranger Things. You’re drawn to the characters, so you want them to live, and you want them not to be possessed or whatever might be the case in a particular show.