Hanging with the in crowd
Cassidy Gifford made friends in scary places for The Gallows
LOS ANGELES • The daughter of football legend Frank Gifford and TV personality Kathie Lee Gifford might soon be better known among teens as a headliner in the horror film The Gallows.
Cassidy Gifford is part of the ensemble in the terror trip, and preview tracking indicates the small flick’s on its way to becoming a big hit.
The Gallows focuses on four students at a small town high school which remounts a play to honour a student who was accidentally hanged to death in the same production 20 years before.
When four of the students rehearsing the play break into the school one night, they become potential victims of what seems to be a vengeful killer.
Besides Gifford, newcomers Reese Mishler, Pfeifer Brown and Ryan Shoos round out the ensemble in the film codirected and co-written by first timers Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff.
The plot is classic genre fodder while the found-footage technique counts as a variation on the quick-cut Blair Witch Project found-footage style.
Gifford’s role, as the judgmental cheerleader, turned out to be the most difficult to cast after Lofing and Cluff auditioned more than 200 actresses.
Three weeks before shooting, they still had not found the appropriate actress when Gifford showed up for a meeting.
“My mom needed to use the bathroom, and so of course, she came in and ended up sitting there for about five minutes,” said the 21-yearold of her protective mother Kathie Lee.
The actress followed up the chat with an audition tape and then a call back to meet the three key players already cast, and who had become close friends. “We kind of hit it off immediately,” Gifford recalled of the group.
They would need the camaraderie to get them through fi l ming in and around Fresno, Calif. during the gruelling night shoots which required improvised dialogue and multiple takes.
“We were grateful for all the hard work we did because it’s hard to get a scare down just right,” she said. “Five seconds off could make or break it, so we had to be specific.”
Gifford also pointed out she had to emote because she’s nothing like the role she plays despite the fact the directors’ used her first name as the character’s name.
“I hope I’m not anything like her,” says Gifford. “I describe her as the girl we all knew in high school and we didn’t necessarily like.”
Of the four Gallows performers, the native of New York had the most
‘I describe her as the girl we all knew in high school and we didn’t necessarily like’
experience, making her debut as an child on the Disney Channel show That’s So Raven.
Six years later, she earned a part on the TV series Blue Bloods and the movie farce Adventures of Serial Buddies. In 2014, she co-starred in God’s Not Dead, and she will be featured in the upcoming thriller Caged No More.
Despite her experience, Gifford admitted that there was a period of adjustment with two directors on The Gallows set. “Chris (Lofing) would tell you what to do and a few seconds later Travis would tell you to do the opposite,” she said. “But you were never afraid to say, ‘Wait — which one should I do?’ They were so involved in everything.”
But “if we had an idea we always felt we had the freedom to talk them and it’s kind of rare.”
The Gallows opens wide July 10.