After two decades onscreen, Judy Greer is finally enjoying life as a scream queen. The 44-year-old actress is following up her role as Jamie Lee Curtis’ daughter in 2018’s Halloween with the latest installment of Hulu’s ongoing Into the Dark horror series, Good Boy, and the anticipated sequel Halloween Kills.
“I’ve learned just how f**king fun it is to make them,” Greer tells ET by phone, explaining that while she loves doing comedy, the horror genre has proved to be way more exciting than she realized. “The minute you scream cut in a horror movie, everyone’s like, ‘Oh my god, that was so cool.’ We’re all just trying to make it as scary and suspenseful as we can. It’s just really fun.”
She adds, “I’m excited about doing more. I hope I get to do more horror movies.”
First up is Into the Dark: Good Boy, from Blumhouse Television, which sees Greer playing Margaret, an anxiety-ridden woman who gets an emotional support dog that turns out to be way more effective than she ever imagined — he seemingly starts to kill everyone who adds stress to her life.
The film follows in the great tradition of Cujo and other haunted or killer animals. But for Greer, who happens to be a dog lover herself, those kinds of movies were hard for her to watch. “I didn’t want them to be real,” she admits. “I guess it was easier to talk myself out of ghosts and goblins and terrorizing spirits and psychopaths. For some reason, I couldn’t talk myself out of a killer dog.”
Luckily for her, her onscreen companion, Chico the dog, was a delight to work with — and over the course of filming, the two created a real bond on set. “Because we were supposed to be so bonded, I was actually allowed to hang out with them more than I usually am when I’m working with animals, which was such a treat,” Greer says, adding that while filming a scene where she was screaming caused Chico to get anxious. “Kimberly, the trainer said he just started going crazy. Like, he got so nervous and scared and anxious. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, really?’ And she said, ‘It was so cute.’”
Perhaps less cute but equally as fun is the upcoming, blood-filled Halloween Kills, which is slated to be released this fall. “I don’t know how it’s coming out but I’m hoping and still pushing for it to come out still in October,” says Jason Blum, the founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions, which is behind the latest installment of the long-running slasher franchise.
Greer will reprise her role as Karen opposite Curtis, with the sequel seeing them continuing to fend off the horrors of serial killer Michael Myers. The 2018 film ended in spectacular fashion with Karen joining her mother, Laurie, to put a stop to Michael once and for all.
When asked if audiences will see more of Karen’s badass transformation, Greer wouldn’t get specific about what we will see of her character. However, she did promise the sequel is “action-packed.”
“I was always out of breath,” she says, explaining that the sequel doesn’t waste any time getting to the heart of the story. “In that first movie, we were saying hi to our old audience and then introducing ourselves to our new audience, like the generation that maybe didn’t know the original. And in this movie, we’re jumping in, if you catch my drift.”
In the meantime, fans know that there will be no shortage of carnage, thanks to Greer’s Instagrams of her blood-covered hands and bloody prop knives. She also says that she spent days in the same bloody costumes because filming would pick up right where they left off the night before. But “it was all for the greater good,” she affirms.
Not surprisingly, both projects — Good Boy and Halloween Kills — are from the Blumhouse TV and film universe. The production company has no shortage of box-office hits. But it’s the female-led ones — Halloween starring Curtis, The Hunt starring Betty Gilpin and Hilary Swank, Invisible Man starring Elisabeth Moss and Ma starring Octavia Spencer — that caught Greer’s attention and why she likes working with the production company so much.
“They’re really championing women in films and they’re casting women that are older than 23. And they aren’t just running around topless. There is something I think that’s so cool about that,” Greer says. “You know, women my age — in their forties and in their thirties — we’re getting older, but we’re not, like, not loving horror movies the way we used to. We still want to watch ourselves in the movies we watched when we were in high school. I still want to watch horror movies and I still want to see people like myself in them.”
And when it comes to her 61-year-old co-star in particular, “I’m like blown away by Jamie Lee Curtis, dude. The sh*t she does. She just has boundless energy and she just never shuts off. She’s such a force,” muses Greer, who concludes by saying, “I think it’s a fun genre to be diving into at this point in my career.”
