As if high school weren’t traumatizing enough, “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin” adds a masked killer into the mix.
The HBO Max slasher show, which is the fourth series in the “Pretty Little Liars” TV franchise, dropped Thursday and follows a group of teen girls as they’re tormented by a mysterious, murderous madman.
“[The girls] are dealing with larger-than-life things, and their lives are literally on the line,” 21-year-old Chandler Kinney, who plays horror movie buff Tabby, told the Daily News. “Especially in ‘Original Sin,’ where our version of [the villain] is cutthroat — metaphorically and literally.”
“Original Sin” is more a scarier, gorier revival of “Pretty Little Liars,” the hit Freeform mystery thriller that ran for seven seasons between 2010 and 2016, than it is a sequel or even a spinoff. A spinoff, “Ravenswood,” and a sequel, “The Perfectionists,” already failed.
Instead, “Original Sin” exists in the same universe, miles away in Millwood, a more blue-collar town than Rosewood, where the five Liars don’t know each other.
Tabby; pregnant teen Imogen (Bailee Madison); ballerina Faran (Zaria); high school athlete Noa (Maia Reficco), who’s straight out of juvie; and introverted computer nerd Mouse (Malia Pyles) are brought together to take down the school bully, a perky blond cheerleader not-so-subtly named Karen (Mallory Bechtel).
“The love story of this season is this friendship and the evolution of the relationship between girls who didn’t start out as friends but become more like family,” co-executive producer Lindsay Calhoon Bring told The News.
“Original Sin” falls more into the slasher genre, complete with its own version of a creepy shadow who goes by “A” and sends haunting texts just like in the original series but also stalks the girls, masked and armed. Through Kinney’s Tabby and her encyclopedic knowledge, the show is steeped in callbacks and homages to horror classics of the ‘80s and ‘90s. But it’s also about five teenage girls trying to survive being teenage girls.
“We find these girls in a place in their life when all of them, individually, are experiencing a level of trauma and tragedy,” said Kinney, who has previously starred in the “Lethal Weapon” TV series and Disney’s “Zombies” trilogy.
“They feel very isolated in what they’re going through. And then collectively, the friendship is borne from the trauma of the mystery and this assailant who is literally running around killing people.”
“A” knows something the girls don’t and their mothers do, demanding justice for a 20-year-old grievance that ripped Millwood apart. It’s unfair to the girls, but A isn’t fair, joked Kinney, who was introduced to the original series in middle school.
“We both wanted to tell the story of generational trauma … of the sins of the mother falling on the child,” Calhoon Bring said of herself and co-executive producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.
As if A weren’t enough, the Liars are also facing what Calhoon Bring and Aguirre-Sacasa called “real-life horrors,” like teenage pregnancies and high school bullies and everything else that normal girls go through.
“The violence, we kind of classified it as horror-movie violence,” Aguirre-Sacasa, who previously developed “Riverdale” and “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” told The News.
“The more real-world horrors that the girls are facing, we’re always gut-checking and making sure we weren’t overwhelming the story or overwhelming the characters. We want them to be triumphant and we don’t want them to be broken victims.”
At the end of the original “Pretty Little Liars,” Spencer, Alison, Aria, Hanna and Emily did triumph, taking down their own Big Bad, Spencer’s secret twin Alex Drake. “Original Sin” dispenses with the “secret” angle immediately, with Karen and her sister, the meeker twin Kelly. That’s a nod to their predecessor characters, the showrunners said, but it’s not the only one.
“Starting with Episode 6, the Easter eggs start coming fast and furious,” Aguirre-Sacasa teased. “And they’re not subtle. They’re literally neon signs. They start and they go up to literally the last minute of the last episode.”
———
