Lauren LaVera: Horror’s Next Scream Queen Is Ready to Kick Back

Years before Art the Clown and the Terrifier franchise, horror conventions and the double-edged sword of “Scream Queen” being bestowed by fans, Lauren LaVera was simply a Philly kid answering a casting call in her hometown. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to pursue acting professionally. Nonetheless, the young, undeniable performer found herself drawn to opportunity after learning M. Night Shyamalan was shooting his next Blumhouse feature, Split, in the City of Brotherly Love.

“It was maybe my first on-set experience,” LaVera recalls of the gig years later from another northeast metropolis, this one on the Hudson. Back then, she was initially hired to appear in a single scene behind principals that included Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula. However, during the lone day of work’s lunch, LaVera and her mother happened to walk past the ever-observant director. And Shyamalan stopped to study the extra.

“I didn’t notice this, but he kind of turned around and looked at me like he knew me,” LaVera says. “My mom told me when I sat down. She asked, ‘Have you met him before?’ And I was like, ‘No, I love him, but no!’ The next day, though, I get a call from the casting director asking if instead of being just the background actor, I could be the stand-in, the body double for Anya Taylor-Joy and the other two girls.”

It marked LaVera’s first taste of professional moviemaking, as well as a bit of a crash course in film school where every day LaVera would be on the set, and Shyamalan more than once would bring her beside the monitor to witness what he looked for in a shot or a performance. The makeshift coursework also came during a turning point for the would-be student, as LaVera had actually just finished school, and her studies included a major in literature and a minor in Italian. Cinema and performance was nowhere to be seen in the curriculum.

“I was an optician for about two years,” LaVera reveals. “It was a really good job, right out of college… and I was becoming quite accomplished at it.” Yet there was something in her, the same thing that led to her walking onto a Split set, which was left wondering and wanting.

Looking back at it now, LaVera credits her acting bug coming from beloved grandmother Joan, a matriarch who dreamed of pursuing dance professionally and who counted Ginger Rogers and Vera-Ellen among her idols. Joan passed that passion to her granddaughter, as well as a story about the dream waylaid by life and a different time.

“When my mommom was on her deathbed, and I was losing one of the most important people in my life, I became more aware of my own mortality and it made me realize I was at a defining crossroads,” LaVera says. “I’d just recently got married and now my boss was offering me a comfortable [raise] and lucrative position. I could’ve done what my grandmother did, really settle down in my job, maybe consider children, even. I just couldn’t shake the longing in her eyes whenever we discussed her dreams. So shortly after her passing, I quit my job and that same night I attended my first proper acting class.” She says she cried all the way to the first lesson.

Thorns on a Scream Queen’s Crown

LaVera’s road on-set beginning with Split seems apropos given her onscreen persona these days. Playing Sienna Shaw in the Terrifier films has placed the actor in rarefied company, with the intentionally archetypal final girl of Terrifier 2 and 3 fame being mentioned by fans in the same breath as Laurie Strode of the Halloween franchise or Nancy Thompson of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The woman who brought Sienna to life might be wary of making quite such grand comparisons, just as she seems flattered if a bit surprised by those who describe her as a scream queen: “That I’ve done enough to earn that feels like a lot for me,” she admits while also pointing out the Sienna character is more inclined to yell with righteous, bloody anger as she stabs David Howard Thornton’s Art the Clown with a sword, as she is to scream in terror.

Still, the performer feels fortunate to have fallen into a singular and tightly woven community with other horror genre faves. The day we meet, LaVera still has sending Linda Blair a “happy birthday” text message on her to-do list. They met at a convention. She also is ready to go to bat for Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, an uncharacteristically feel-good Stephen King adaptation from a fellow maestro of the macabre, and in which LaVera enjoys a small cameo as an Italian reporter.

“He asked me to do a voiceover, which I was thrilled to do, because he remembered I spoke Italian and he needed different voices with different languages,” the actor says.

This bilingual talent is also on display in her latest genre effort, Twisted, which is due out on VOD on Friday, Feb. 6. In the film from director Darren Lynn Bousman, LaVera plays confidence woman Paloma, an ambiguous grifter who along with her romantic and professional partner, Smith (Mia Healey), has made a habit of renting out luxury homes and New York City apartments they don’t actually own. This eventually gets them into trouble when they pull this shtick on a unit in the possession of a doctor with deceptively pleasant beside manner (Djimon Hounsou).

“It is interesting,” LaVera says of the generational dynamics between her heroine and Hounsou’s not-so-good doctor. “I do feel that my generation and generations below me will probably continue to struggle greatly to buy property. So I feel that [the movie] is current in its own fun way. It’s like, ‘Fuck you if you’re not gonna let us afford houses. You’ve been scamming us for so long, so why don’t we scam the scammers?’”

A major appeal of the film was also working with Hounsou whose resume runs the gamut from Gladiator to Jim Sheridan’s In America. LaVera describes the legendary character actor as having a regal presence about him: “I believe he was a king in his past life.” It made doing the movie easy, as did seeing so much of herself in Paloma. After all, they’re women who both love putting on a show.

“I think Paloma had a secret want to perform in some way, and I think that’s why she goes above and beyond to put on these accents for these different characters,” LaVera explains about her characterization. “I think it’s her way of releasing this desire she always had. So I made diaries for every single one of those characters Paloma plays.”

The choice further allowed LaVera and Paloma both to have fun with developing cadence and rhythms, with the actress saying she developed the con woman’s various accents, right down to which regions of Ireland or the UK each persona supposedly hailed from. When it comes to using an Italian accent, however, LaVera sheepishly confides she’s a bit more predetermined to connotations since they match her family, who hail from Naples, Capri, and other parts of Southern Italy. “I learned Italian in college. My family didn’t teach me Italian. But now that I speak with my family and friends, they live in Naples, and Neapolitan is completely different from Italian.”

One More Dance with Art the Clown

Twisted is the first time LaVera has collaborated with Bousman, a cult favorite for his work on many of the Saw sequels, beginning with Saw II, III, and IV. LaVera grew up with them all, and in fact counts the first Saw (from director James Wan) as one of the formative moviegoing experiences of her life. The film left her completely shaken when the killer turned out to be hiding in plain sight on a scuzzy bathroom floor.

Truth be told, though, her favorite genres as a child were more likely to be the kind of comedies her grandmother enjoyed, and the martial arts movies Lauren discovered along the way.

“My mommom loved watching I Love Lucy with Lucille Ball, and I would put on skits from them when I was like two or three,” says LaVera. “I would just jump out and shout, ‘Presenting Lauren!’ and I would imitate the skit that I saw in a scene. And then I started watching Bruce Lee movie and Jackie Chan movies, and Michelle Yeoh, and I was like, ‘Oh, I want to kick something really hard!’”

The dream of combining the comedy of Lucille Ball with the physicality and also distinct comedic genius of Jackie Chan caused LaVera to pursue martial arts lessons long before that fateful acting class. And ironically, it was also this physicality which led her to horror after Terrifier writer-director Damien Leone saw some boxing reels that LaVera was talked into filming by her management at the time. The choice paid off since in her intentionally half-hearted kicks and punches (she was embarrassed about releasing them online), Leone saw an action heroine in them nonetheless, and one who could stand up to the nastiest movie slasher this side of the 1980s.

“I think a big piece of Sienna is Damien,” LaVera considers, “even though he wrote her as a woman, or as a girl for the second film, I think there’s something about her that is just a part of him entirely, which I think is quite beautiful.”

The pair bonded over conceptualizing Sienna’s musical loves and influences, with LaVera journaling those interests in Sienna’s voice, and Leone in turn creating playlists he thought his heroine would listen to (and which LaVera suspects are largely Leone’s favorites). They also compared notes on many of the final girls of yore, with LaVera going down a rabbit hole of binging Final Destination, Scream, and more.

The approach worked, with Sienna carving out her own place in the final girl pantheon, even as the iconography she cuts is one which LaVera freely admits to having complicated feelings about.

“It’s no secret at this point that I really did not enjoy that costume,” LaVera says of the angelic, and sparse, Halloween costume Sienna spends much of Terrifier 2 wearing. “It was so uncomfortable. It wasn’t finished; it wasn’t really properly put together and there was no lining on the inside, so I got a lot of blisters, a lot of cuts.”

When asked to think of the most extreme thing she experienced on a Terrifier set, it was not a prosthetic effect or mountain of gore that springs to mind (though LaVera notes being forced by Art to bite into a viscera of “pink goo” during Terrifier 3 comes close). No, it’s shooting in the Fright Factory in Philadelphia during winter in that costume: “I’ve never been colder than on that set, especially in that costume. I was freezing in Terrifier 2.”

The amount of pride LaVera feels for Sienna, however, and the impact that image has had, extending into Terrifier 3 where a more seasonally prepared Sienna is all but crucified by Art the Clown who adorns her with a crown of thorns, is palpable.

“It’s so easy to kind of pin her as this guardian angel, this savior,” says LaVera, “but in my mind, she’s more in this Grecian epic. Like I think there’s something very Greek about it all and very tragic. She’s experiencing this hero’s journey which is cloaked in mysticism.”

Grecian might be a good term, too, heading into Terrifier 4, which Leone has confirmed will be the grand finale of the saga and will pick up after Sienna saw her younger cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose) vanish into an abyss, which might as well be Hades by another word. Now Sienna is vowing to enter the proverbial underworld and bring her cousin back.

Unlike on Terrifier 3, Leone is apparently keeping the fourth installment close to the chest from even LaVera and Thornton, who were given hints and ideas in the past of where things were going. They also in turn could offer their own ideas.

“I haven’t read any of the script yet,” LaVera confirms. “I don’t think Damien’s even done writing it as of right now. I’m sure he’s close to done based off things he has texted me and what he’s been telling the press, but no, he’s kept it completely under wraps from David, from myself, from all of the other cast and crew. So it’ll be a surprise.”

With that said, the actress can reveal what she would like to see.

“I want Jonathan to be alive; I want Gabbie to be saved; and I want some sort of retribution for Sienna, however that will look. I think our girl’s been through enough and she deserves a win, whatever it will look like for her. Whether or not she survives, I don’t know, but I think she deserves a win.”

A Final Escape

When we catch up with LaVera, she’s in New York City preparing for what would turn out to be the first of several snowstorms to bear down on the east coast inside of a week. Having lived her whole life around this neck of the woods, she doesn’t seem rattled by the weather. In fact, she ponders if the darkness and general lack of sunlight might explain why so many horror filmmakers come out of the places she calls home.

And with Twisted on the eve of release, and Terrifier 4 in the offing, she has plenty of horror still to come. This might likewise explain when looking to the future, she is hoping for subject matter that is perhaps a little sunnier.

Getting a chance to do an action movie still remains the dream for the actor, as would perhaps working on a layered television series like her current rewatch obsession, Succession. Really though, she seems just ready to laugh.

“I want to do a rom-com,” LaVera reveals. “I just want someone to pay to fly me to an island where I cannot be cold like I was in the Terrifier franchise. There would be a spa so I can get a massage, or just be on a beach. I do love lighthearted storytelling, but that would just be a nice change and a nice break on my body. It’s very stressful doing horror.”

Heavy still lies the crown, thorns or otherwise.