Hana Mae Lee Recalls ‘Frightening’ Paranormal Experience Filming Pitch Perfect

Hana Mae Lee tapped into her childhood fear for her new role in “Phobias.”

In an interview with TooFab, the actress opened up about her fear of paranormal activity and recalled a “frightening” experience from when she shot the first “Pitch Perfect” film.

“Phobias” follows a group of five people, who all suffer from unique fears. In the film, Lee’s character Sami has vehophobia, the fear of driving.

“I have experience in kind of the paranormal fear I guess,” Lee said, when asked how she prepared for the project. “[In the film], my car starts to break down…basically things start to happen that I didn’t do nor the Caprice did. So there’s obviously some sort of thing or spirit or phenomenon that’s taking over. For me, it was not a far stretch because I have a crazy imagination and since I was little I always thought there were things behind me or under my bed. Even when people just walk in all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Ah!’ I just freak out.”

“It came to me naturally,” she continued. “I mean when I was younger and up until recently, I’m always scared of paranormal things instead of things that you should be frightened of.”

Lee revealed she came face-to-face with her fear while filming “Pitch Perfect” in Baton Rouge back in 2011.

“There was this incident…when we were shooting [the first] ‘Pitch Perfect,’ in our hotel that we’re staying at, me and some of the cast members would have these really weird dreams,” she recalled. “We’d just share them on our way to set and there was this one time where a lot of people were going to go to New Orleans — we were shooting in Baton Rouge — and I took a nap and had this crazy nightmare, it was terrible. And also I felt like there was this being or some sort of thing in the room and I think that night there was a shooting in New Orleans.”

“I ended up not going because I just got so physically ill,” she continued. “I don’t know if it was from the dream or psychosis or whatever, but it was crazy. And this being in my room kind of kept haunting, I felt like it was kind of haunting me throughout the night and you know like production’s like, ‘We can switch rooms?’ But I kind of wanted to stay there and feel it out I guess as weird as that is.”

Lee said the paranormal activity “calmed down” around the third and fourth week of the three-month shoot.

“That sort of paranormal experience — it’s frightening at first, very frightening,” she explained. “I just kind of try not to freak out because I’m like, why do I feel this way? Is something really here and is it trying to scare me or is just trying to like do its thing?”

“It was weird because those dreams kept happening,” she added. “Even after I came home, I would look up things online and there’d be some crazy incidents. [There’s] something very spiritual about Baton Rouge and New Orleans.”

Meanwhile, Lee — whose “Pitch Perfect” co-star Alexis Knapp also has a small role in “Phobias” — shared her thoughts on whether she’d be interested in doing a fourth “Pitch Perfect” film if the opportunity arose.

“Hell yeah! I mean, I’m getting old but if you guys wanna see me dance you know, that’s your fault,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll do it. Whenever the choreographer would show us certain moves in this last one, I’m like, ‘I think I’m a little too old for that.’ And all the girls will be like, ‘Ugh. We’re not old!’ And I’m like, ‘I know, but my body’s saying I’m old. It’s just me maybe.'”

Although Lee admitted that she had “no idea” if there will be another installment, she said she thinks the cast would be “up for it.”

“The book that it’s based [on], I mean they perform for years together and all that,” she told TooFab. “I mean it’s possible. I always thought we’d be like a ‘Fast & Furious’ kind of franchise, like four, five, six, seven, eight, nine…It’s been going for a long time. That would be fun though, to see what it would be like even 30 years from now.”

Check out our full interview with Lee in the video, above!

“Phobias” is available now on digital and on demand.