Olivia Scott Welch Can't Stop, Won't Stop With the Incredible Outfits

Did any of the Panic challenges test your real-life fears?

Oh my gosh, yes! The first one, jumping off the cliff. I didn’t know this about myself, because I don’t have

a fear of heights. I can go to a really high place and be totally fine. But then, we go to do the stunt of the cliff jump ( it’s not me in the show when she jumps off the cliff—that’s my stunt double, but I did a lot of stuff on a stage wearing a harness), and the minute they were like, “Alright, run and jump” from this huge three-story fake cliff, I was like, “Yeah, sure.” And then, every single time, my brain would be like, “No.” I could not jump off the fake cliff. I had to get over it fast because they were like, “Alright, we’re shooting this today, so you have to,” and I was like, “Yeah, got it!” At first, I was like, “I can’t physically do this. My body will not let me jump off.” It was so scary, but it was good. I guess now I can jump off of things. It was immediate immersion therapy.  

How do you think you would fare in a real-life game of Panic? 

When it starts to get to the more psychological stuff, I think I’d do pretty well, but I would not be able to get past stuff in the beginning. I don’t think I would enter because I simply can’t jump off a cliff. If I could jump into Panic episode five, the haunted-house challenge, I’d win, but I wouldn’t be able to do the first ones, and I’d immediately be out. 

Okay, let’s talk about Fear Street! The trilogy is based on R.L. Stine’s infamous book series and takes place across three different time periods: 1994, 1978, and 1666. I read you have been a big fan of the horror genre since you were a kid, so you must have been a kid in a candy store working on these films. 

100% 

What did you enjoy most about the process? Did anything surprise you?

The thing that surprised me the most was how it’s such hard work to make a horror movie. It’s funny because you see them and you think, “Oh, that would be so fun,” but the timing of them is so essential. If you have a bunch of blood in a scene and then you have to do the scene again, you have to clean up all of the blood. It’s very thoughtful to make a horror movie in a way I didn’t expect. It’s a very tedious process, which was really cool. And that’s the thing. I love them so much and want to take them seriously, so the fact that, by nature, you take them seriously was very satisfying. It really was like being a kid in a candy store making them because they also pay so much homage to the movies that I loved growing up. So there would be times where they would be like, “We’re going to make a little reference here to Nightmare on Elm Street,” and I’d be like, “Yes! This is the best day of my life because I know immediately what this reference is, and we’re doing it right now today.” Anytime they would bring a jug of fake blood in, I was like, “This is awesome. This is the fake blood that’s in all of the movies I love.” Not this exact fake blood, but the fake blood in theory.