And the rest is hysteria

In a Hollywood where Angelina Jolie has just been cast as Colin Farrell’s mother for Oliver Stone’s epic treatment of Alexander The Great, Nicki Aycox suffers from the opposite problem. She’s 28 now, but this petite Oklahoma born blonde keeps ending up in movie high-school.

“It’s really frustrating, I feel myself really wanting to play someone my own age,” she told me when I caught up with her recently, “because you get to a point where you start to find teenage parts very samey. I’d really enjoy playing 28, instead of some girl who gets upset because she’s lost her prom-date!”
Oh well, just think of the cash she’ll save on Botox bills in the long term, while in the short term her youthful appearance has landed her the role of chief teen-in-peril In Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers 2.
In case you missed the first installment of this horror franchise, this creature feature boasts an immortal organ-harvesting Freddy-with-wings monster that awakens every twenty-three years and feeds for twenty three days. This time around a group of jocks and cheerleaders get stranded in a bus on a spooky backroad at night (naturally).
Given the demographic, the collective IQ of the group is even lower than usual, and before you can say, ‘don’t walk out into the night’, the collective find themselves being picked off one by one for Creeper chow. Throw in an Ahab-style Creeper hunter (Played by Ray ‘Laura Palmer’s dad’ Wise) and where the original movie played around with the road movie conventions of Duel and the like, JC2 nods towards such siege classics as Rio Bravo or The Thing.
Nicki puts in an impressive turn as cheerleader Minxie, the official brains of the outfit who suddenly finds herself beseiged with Creeper-related visions. The actress admits though, that she wasn’t exactly up on the genre before the bagged the part.
“I had to do a lot of research,” she admits, “because I had really bad nightmares growing up, so I was never allowed to watch any horror related stuff. I hadn’t even seen the first Jeepers Creepers until just before my audition.”
Were there any particular scream queens that inspired her towards gore-fest glory?
“Well, because my character has a psychic connection with the Creeper, I looked more towards psychological horror, though I did watch A Nightmare On Elm Street and Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, and all the scream classics. The films that I found more useful though, were less commercial and more creepy, films like The Birds – I watched a lot of Hitchcock, and Ringu – which I loved, and then I watched the remake The Ring, afterwards. I wanted to do something suspenseful and supernatural, rather than just doing the whole screaming thing. “
Where she was once a hide-behind-the-couch kind of girl, Nicki, who made her name mainly in TV shows such as Ed and Providence, as well as chalking up roles in films like Slap Her, She’s French and Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, now finds horror flicks considerably less daunting.
“I could never watch any of the gore, but now that I’ve shot a horror movie, I feel like it’s almost my duty to watch,” she says. “I saw 28 Days Later, and it was such role reversal, because my boyfriend kept jumping into my lap, and going ‘How can you watch this?’.I’m like, but that’s just plastic on their faces. It was funny because now I can ruin things for others! What power!”
She claims to be a reformed scaredy cat then, but even during filming, the poorly-lit back roads didn’t get to her like the rest of the cast and crew.
“Nearly everyone there was from LA, but I grew up eight miles from nowhere in Oklahoma, so dark little roads are like home to me. The only difficult thing about the entire shoot was that my character is really emotional - she’s like a psychic interlock who links the two movie’s storylines together - so there were really heightened scenes where you’d have to stay hysterical for thirteen hours until filming was over for the day. Now that was scary.”

Jeepers Creepers 2 is released August 29