The Horrored Girls is back for season two, and the women running it did not ease into it. The video podcast, streaming free on Screamify, returned Wednesday with hosts Geri Courtney-Austein and Harley Bronwyn welcoming Jessica Rothe into a new studio, with a new producer chiming in from off to the side of the mic. The episode is called "Jessica Rothe: Death Looks Good on Her," and over the course of about an hour, Rothe, best known as Tree Gelbman in the Happy Death Day movies, talks less about scares than about survival, the kind that follows you home after the cameras stop.
That survival instinct, Rothe told the hosts, looks different now that she has two kids. She described it as a mama-bear setting that never fully switches off, the same part of her that used to size up the family dog by whether she could physically carry it out of the house in an emergency. These days the math is more complicated and the stakes feel higher, and she said the constant lifting of small children has left her with biceps she never asked for. It is a funny image, but the point underneath it was not: motherhood rewired what she is afraid of losing, and that shows up in every project she takes now.
The hosts and Rothe spent a long stretch on the horror of the body itself, the changes nobody warns you about and the strength that gets built out of necessity rather than vanity. It is the kind of conversation horror fans have been having quietly for years, dressed up as a joke about biceps but landing somewhere closer to the genre's oldest subject: a body doing things it should not be able to do, and a woman learning to live inside that.
Ambition came up too, and here Rothe was unusually direct. She said she wants to play a villain next, something stylized like Mia Goth's turn in Ti West's Pearl. Talking through that film, Rothe zeroed in on the desire driving Pearl, the need to be seen and chosen, and called it a need so human it barely needed horror trappings to work. The room rated Pearl at zero martinis on the hosts' villain-thirst scale. Somewhere in the same breath, the room landed on the idea that all three of them should make a western together, a bit that started as a joke and sounded, by the end, like something Rothe actually wants.
What She's Promoting, and Where to Watch
The reason for the visit is Beware Boiúna, Rothe's new creature feature from director Mike P. Nelson and writer Alan B. McElroy, co-starring Kiana Madeira. It opened at Fantastic Fest in September and hit U.S. theaters through Lionsgate on October 2. Rothe described shooting in the Amazon with snake wranglers on set keeping real snakes away from the cast, and said the film plays grittier than most giant-snake pictures bother to be. The Horrored Girls season two premiere is streaming now, free on Screamify across iOS, Android, web and TVs, with new episodes landing weekly.
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