Hayden Panettiere loves being known as a bonafide scream queen. She jumps back into the world of horror with her latest film, Amber Alert, but knowing how to deliver a bone chilling audience experience is a skill she never would have learned without director Wes Craven.
“With [Amber Alert], we had to tackle how to build anticipation, and I learned from the best during my first horror movie [Scream 4] with Wes,” the actress, 35, exclusively told Us Weekly. “He taught me things knowing that I had never done horror before. Like, the speed of your walk. [You have to] slow it way down even though it might feel uncomfortable.”
Panettiere pointed to a moment in 2011’s Scream 4 when her character, Kirby Reed, approaches the closet where she thinks the crazed serial killer Ghostface is hiding. Although she initially recalled feeling like she was moving in “slow motion,” she quickly learned from Craven why it was so effective.
“It gives that perfect timing that you have to find to get the right reaction out of the audience, that scare, that jump,” she explained.
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While Craven died in 2015, Panettiere has taken his mentorship along with her in all her projects, including her return as fan favorite Kirby for Scream VI last year. Final girls, Panettiere said, are always “really fun to play” because it means stepping into the world of a character who is in a “heightened emotional state.”
Amber Alert has plenty of those jump scare moments Panettiere has perfected, but the fast-paced thriller is a “different kind of horror” than she’s done before; it’s based on real life terrors this time, not a mystery figure sporting a white mask.
The film follows Jaq (Panettiere), a woman who chases down an Uber driver named Shane (Tyler James Williams) to beg him for a rideshare before his shift is over. Their trip home turns from mundane to deadly when they spot a car that matches the description sent out on a recent Amber Alert about a 7-year-old girl’s (Ducky Cash) kidnapping. With law enforcement unable to catch up quickly, Jaq and Shane enter a high-speed game of cat and mouse in an attempt to save the child’s life — and end up putting their own lives on the line in the process.
“[Abducted children are] something that happens every day,” Panettiere told Us of why she chose to do the film, noting that she hopes the film serves as a wake up call to people who don’t pay attention to their devices. “People are allowed to turn [alerts] off now. Sometimes [notifications are] about the weather, but a lot of the times it’s an Amber Alert. And if everyone who’s on the road, or even walking, took a second to look around them, even if they’re in a rush, we could rescue these children being abducted.”
Panettiere, who is mom to 8-year-old daughter Kaya, said she “absolutely” feels more urgency in taking on roles like Jaq now that she’s a parent herself, sharing that there are “a lot of topics and projects” she hopes to cover in the future” that send important messages to the audience.
Staying vigilant about child abduction, however, remains at the top of the list.
“It was important for me to do this movie because it’s going to change people’s behaviors and how they handle themselves in those situations,” she explained. “I know a lot of people don’t even want to watch the news these days because we want to block out the horrors that are happening around the world and not think of them as being real, but they are. So I pray that everyone who sees this movie, if they have turned off that alert on their phone, turns it back on, and next time they see that, they just take a second.”
Panettiere emphasized how much of a difference just a few seconds can make.
“If every single person in every other car around you did the same thing, we could save children from never coming back, from death, from torture,” she continued. “This is not a joke. These are real things that people are capable of doing. And it makes you sick.”
Amber Alert is now available in select theaters and on demand.
