Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 4, 2003, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It’s as incongruous a setting as one could imagine for interviewing the star of a horror film in production. Ordinarily, a genre location visit involves a dark, atmospheric and/or gore-strewn set, talking with actors covered in prosthetics, or at least clad in grue-streaked clothes. But this particular situation involves sitting on the back porch of a charming house in the Hamptons area, on a beautiful early-summer day, chatting with the lovely and currently blood-free young actress Amy Jo Johnson.
The occasion is the shooting of Infested, a satirical horror movie debuting on video from Columbia TriStar following festival play last year. Johnson has just come from being confronted and choked by a zombified onscreen pal played by Lisa Ann Hadley; this afternoon, she’ll face off against an invasion force of deadly flies (which will be CGI’d in later). Off-camera, however, she’s unfazed by either taking part in such mayhem or moving on from the high-profile TV series Felicity to this shot-on-video chiller—albeit one being lensed on a 24-frame hi-def system, with co-stars including Zach Galligan (Gremlins) and Robert Duncan McNeill (Star Trek: Voyager).
“We have a couple of days left, and it’s been going very well,” she says. “It’s been fun, and everyone involved is cool. I’m the only one who doesn’t really die, which is good—I liked that when I read the script.” Not that she isn’t put through some life-threatening situations, as described above, which have involved Johnson doing “a little bit” of stuntwork. “It’s a very physical movie,” she admits. “I had to fall out of the shower for one scene, and there are a few little fights, but I haven’t had to do anything dangerous.”
More challenging has been bringing off writer/director Josh Olson’s combination of frights and humor; the film is set up as a horrific spin on The Big Chill, with Johnson in the Meg Tilly role. “It’s kind of hard,” she says of this approach. “There is sort of a fine line between how much to play the comedy and how much to make it real. You have to find a balance there; it’s a tricky process.” So is performing against absent CGI menaces, though the actress points out that for her, this work is “only with the flies, and that hasn’t been too hard. They’re just coming at me from all over, and that’s kind of easy to imagine.”
Johnson first won a legion of young fans as Kimberly Hart, a.k.a. the pink member of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the popular TV show and a pair of subsequent features. She got more hardcore genre experience in the Yves Simoneau-directed “Rest Stop” episode of Night Visions and as the young vampire Alicia in Robert C. Masciantonio’s indie feature Cold Hearts. Like Infested, that movie went straight to video (as a Synapse Films DVD), and Johnson points out other similarities:
“They’re both shot on the East Coast with a good group of people; there’s almost a summer camp vibe to them,” she notes. “Both of them are first-time directors, which is always interesting. The difference is that we filmed almost all of Cold Hearts at night. We were literally up all night shooting, and then we’d sleep all day, so I felt like a vampire by the end of that one. Infested is the opposite; most of this movie takes place during the day.
“I was kind of lucky with my part, because Alicia is an anorexic vampire,” Johnson says of her unusual Cold Hearts role. “She doesn’t like being a vampire; she doesn’t like sucking blood and stuff. I had a lot of fun with that; I wish my part had been a little bit bigger.” Alicia exits the movie via a spectacular meltdown; the heavy makeup FX appear grueling on screen, but the actress recalls it as no big deal. “It was fun, it was only one afternoon. It was only a couple of hours, about three or four,” to get the charred prosthetics applied.
Johnson (who played a singer in the 1999 TV movie Sweetwater) has recently been dividing her time between her acting and music careers; following Infested, she took time off from screen work to complete an album, The Trans-American Treatment, which debuted at the end of 2001. “Music is something I’ve always been interested in, and I’m really focusing in on it now,” she says. “I don’t believe you can do both [acting or music] fully; I just have to concentrate on the one. With an album, I have to do things like go on tour, so I’m going to devote my attention to that. But I love acting so much that I want to come back next year and do another movie. I just love working and finding good, fun roles.”
And that would include work in our favorite genre, one that the actress has recently come to enjoy. “This year I had a lot of fun watching a bunch of horror movies,” Johnson says. “I like getting a thrill, I like getting scared, I like something that makes you jump.” But she remains picky: “I read a few horror scripts this year, a couple of really terrible ones,” she laughs. “Horror’s a really hard thing to do now. In the past four years or so, some of the horror movies were not as good as the ones from the ’70s and early ’80s. There’s something a little cheesy about the films that have come out recently. Not necessarily saying any names, but they’ve just been kill-’em-off movies.
“I actually have a problem with slash-’em-up movies,” Johnson continues. “I won’t do them, because I feel like it’s sort of a bad energy to put out there. But when it has to do with monsters or vampires or killer flies, that’s fun; I’ll do that kind of thing.”
