Jennifer Morrison is best known for her starring roles in shows like Once Upon a TimeandHouse, as well as memorable/recurring roles inHow I Met Your Motherand Star Trek. But lately, she’s been killing it behind the camera as a director, in particular with the Paramount+/Showtime series Yellowjackets. The spooky woods where teenage soccer players descend into madness and cannibalism, surviving a plane crash, are very different from the Enchanted Forest Morrison’s Emma Swan often inhabited on OUAT – despite both filming in the wilds of British Columbia. In an interview with Perri Nemirofffor Collider Ladies Night, Morrison talked about her creatively fulfilling experience at the helm of two episodes in Yellowjackets Season 3 and one episode in the upcoming fourth and final season.
“Yellowjackets is like a part of my soul at this point,” says Morrison. “I have not come to terms with the fact that the show is ending, because it has felt so like a creative family for me to be able to go there and do what I do.” The two episodes that Morrison contributed to as director in the third season of Yellowjackets are Episode 4, “12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis,” a.k.a. the one with the trial; and Episode 7, “Croak,” a.k.a. the one with the frog people. Both of those episodes were absolute game-changers; “Croak” is the highest-rated episode of the season on IMDb, but “12 Angry Girls…” is weirdly underrated.
Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
🏕️Jason
🔪Michael
💤Freddy
🎈Pennywise
🪆Chucky
01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
Morrison Directed “Pivotal” & “Massive” Episodes in Season 3
In “12 Angry Girls…,” the yellowjackets finally try their hand at something resembling conventional society. They put Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) on trial for burning down the cabin where they used to sleep. Misty (Sammi Hanratty) and Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) are the lawyers, and Nat (Sophie Thatcher) is the judge. However, none of them are in control. Slowly, and painfully, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) whips the entire jury in her favor, and they sentence Ben to death. It was the first time on the show that the yellowjackets decided on someone’s fate as a group, and out of a warped sense of justice rather than necessity.
“Ashley [Lyle] and Bart [Nickerson], the showrunners on that show, infuse every moment with so much character. It’s unbelievable. Like, I was aware of it watching it, but until I was actually breaking down a script and trying to decide where I wanted to approach the scene and what I wanted my shot list to be, what entry point I wanted to take…” Morrison told Nemiroff. “You could make a thousand different versions of the show because there is such a density of story and character on every single page, and you are forced as a filmmaker to choose a perspective, because otherwise you can’t shoot it. You have to. You absolutely have to. There are too many people, there are too many stories, so you have to choose a way in and 100% commit; otherwise it’s just kind of a mess.”
Morrison went on to explain that she knew “12 Angry Girls…” would be a turning point for the series going in, she told Nemiroff, “Ashley and Bart […] were like, ‘In Yellowjackets, there will always be before the trial, and there will be after the trial. Before the trial, everyone pretty much is off the hook in terms of they were doing what they had to do to survive. After the trial, everyone is culpable of crimes.'” Knowing the weight of the episode, Morrison was honored to helm such a pivotal moment in the series. “And I was like, oh my God, what a huge, pivotal episode for a show. Like, not just a season, but just the turning point of the show. And so there was a lot of pressure on that to make sure that it felt special.” She continued, saying:
“I knew that they were deeply inspired by 12 Angry Men, which is one of my favorite films. I mean, I’d say top 10 in terms of just craftsmanship and intentionality, and just a total classic that I’ve always loved. So I watched that a million times and very intentionally designed the episode to reflect the math equation that was put in place with 12 Angry Men. It’s very rare that you could go to showrunners and say, like, ‘I’m going to do this crazy thing all the way through and totally commit to it,’ and they were like, ‘Great. Go ahead. Go do it.’ They were so supportive and so excited about it.”
Morrison went on to talk about how she connects with the show’s very specific tone and the privilege of filming “Croak” — which serves as another massive turning point for the series. A huge risk of an episode, “Croak” introduced three new characters played by Joel McHale, Nelson Franklin, and Ashley Sutton via flashback. The girls, who have just become totally adult-free for the first time in their lives, do not take well to the newcomers. It’s one of the most violent and shocking episodes of the violent and shocking show.
“It was massive and insane, establishing three new characters, throwing a guy over a cliff, putting an arrow through someone’s shoulder, putting an ax in someone’s head,” Morrison says. “Usually, on an episode of television, you have one thing that gets talked about a lot — every scene had something like that. It was just such an absolutely dense undertaking […] We were able to just tackle an immense amount of wild shit. I don’t know how else to put it. It was just wild.”
Morrison Teases What’s to Come on ‘Yellowjackets’ in Season 4
How can Morrison and Yellowjackets top that? Well, the episode she directed for the show’s fourth and final season intends to do just that. The initial plan was for her to do two episodes, but scheduling (and shooting her own pilot for Amazon with her Yellowjackets Season 4 DP Corey Robson) got in the way. Morrison couldn’t reveal any plot details about her next episode of Yellowjackets but she promises fans are in for another wild experience. She told Nemiroff:
“I can’t talk about the episode, but I would say the episode I got to do this season […] I would say it is as wild, if not wilder, than Episode 7 of Season 3. I just am coming out of another experience of, I would pitch all these wild things to them, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, go do it, go do it, go do it.’ […] We did some wild shit again, and it was really exciting. It’s so satisfying. It doesn’t matter how crazy the hours are. It doesn’t matter what you’re up against. You get to the end of a day where you feel that creatively supported, and you are just given such rich material to deal with, and then you’ve got these actors who are just game. They’re just game. Like, they’re perfectly cast. They have range like nobody’s business. I would tell anyone and everyone in this industry to hire everyone who’s ever worked on Yellowjackets. They’re just incredible.”
As fans of the show and the cast, we would agree! Every single one of the adult actors is an established icon getting to stretch their range in new and exciting directions; and every single one of the younger actors deserves to reach that icon status for the range they’re showing on this show alone. It’s so tragic that the show is ending so soon, but at least it’s not going to go out with a whisper. We’ll be screaming all the way to the Yellowjackets series finale, baby! Buzz buzz!
You can watch Morrison’s full episode of Collider Ladies Night below.
