“Pretty Little Liars: Summer School” bosses preview more horror in season 2

Bloody Rose Waters isn't messing around.

It's almost time to return to Millwood, where the only thing worse than summer school is being stalked by a murderer (again).

When Pretty Little Liars: Summer School kicks off, the Liars are still reeling from their numerous near-death experiences. Specifically, Imogen (Bailee Madison), Minnie (Malia Pyles), Noa (Maia Reficco), Tabby (Chandler Kinney), and Faran (Zaria) are waiting to find out what will happen to "A" himself, Archie Waters. But as the season progresses, it becomes clear that Archie is no longer their biggest concern. Rather, it's his mother — or at least someone pretending to be — who starts terrorizing the teens as Bloody Rose Waters.

Entertainment Weekly spoke with co-showrunners Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Lindsay Calhoon Bring about what to expect from season 2.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Heading into season 2, what elements of season 1 did you want to carry over?

ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA: The great thing about season 2 is the girls are already friends. And in any iteration of Pretty Little Liars, whenever the girls are together sitting on those couches or sitting around a picnic table talking, that's gold. That's the show. The other big thing coming out of season 2 for us was when we introduced slasher and horror elements to season 1. We were really emboldened and heartened that the fans loved all those horror elements. Those were the two things that we knew we wanted to keep alive and thriving in season 2.

I love the idea that, this season, the killer isn't just going after them, but she's also testing them.

LINDSAY CALHOON BRING: That tied in thematically with summer school. One of the things we talked about for this season was we didn't want to forget all the events of season 1. We wanted to have a little more runway to have fun, to have the girls be together more now that they're friends, to introduce new characters, but we're not just turning our back on everything that they've been through. So, we wanted to make sure that we kept that alive but still kept them moving forward.

However, one very literal way that they cannot move forward in their lives is by being stuck in summer school when they should be having so much fun. So, we loved the idea that these girls are being tested by some psychotic, skinned, faceless woman, and then they still have to study at night because they have an exam. But we also have a villain putting them through Saw-like tests all season.

What was your inspiration for this season's killer, Bloody Rose Waters?

AGUIRRE-SACASA: In the Friday the 13th movies and in Halloween, the constant is Jason. The constant is Michael Myers. And for us, our constant is the girls. We talked a lot about, "Do we want another season with 'A'?" It felt like, "No. We've done that." Something that really clicked for us was the Slender Man. And we started talking about the Slender Man, the real true-crime case and we kind of loved and were terrified by the ambiguity of the idea that this sort of supernatural creature that exists on the internet could inspire real violence or crossover into the real world.

That was definitely a big inspiration for Bloody Rose. And then we had done a big hulking masculine janitor suit-wearing maniac, so we liked the idea of trying to do a feminine, primal maternal figure of horror that nodded to Norma Bates, Julia Cotton from Hellraiser II, the Babadook —

BRING: — Pamela Voorhees.

AGUIRRE-SACASA: Yeah. It felt like, in season 1, our villain was Jason, and in season 2, our villain was Jason's mother, as opposed to in Friday the 13th, which in part one, the villain is Jason's mother, and then it becomes Jason. It felt like a nice inversion of that.

BRING: Aesthetically, when building her, we worked with our team and really wanted to start from a place of mythology and the mythology of Archie. And so we asked, "What does Archie look like? What's behind the mask? What's the mask?" We had sort of this patchwork mask of leather sewn together, and we thought, "That's so eerie. That's so terrifying. What's the story there? How did that mask come to be?" And we thought the most horrific version of that was, "Well, he skinned his mother. He skinned his mother's face and he sewed it up and he wears it around." So, we loved the iconography of this sort of skinless woman. As Roberto mentioned, Julia Cotton, who we consider to be an absolute icon —

AGUIRRE-SACASA: — A gay icon.

BRING: We were very inspired by her and loved that look of gauze. But we knew we wanted Bloody Rose, like Bloody Mary, to be oozing in blood, dripping, less fabulous than Julia. We think she thrifts. She's a little bit of a thrifter. We're obsessed with Bloody Rose. We love her. We're terrified by her, and we think she's a star.

You've added some great new characters in season 2, and yet every new person on this show just feels like a suspect.

AGUIRRE-SACASA: On a normal show, when you introduce new love interests, it's usually to cause trouble with the old love interest, but on a horror show, when you introduce a new character, they're either a love interest, a suspect, or a victim. So, don't get too attached to any of them because they might be killing people or they might be dead.

BRING: The simple YA version of the show is they're here to stir the pot and in the horror YA version of the show, it's, "Everyone is a suspect," which is sad but also fun. So, we hope that our girls will find love, but they have to keep their guards up for sure.

Pretty Little Liars: Summer School premieres with two episodes on Thursday, May 9, on Max.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.