What do you get when you cross time travel, a Blumhouse slasher, and an '80s high school comedy? Well, that would be Totally Killer, the latest movie from Nahnatchka Khan, whose previous directorial offering was the 2019 rom-com Always Be My Maybe, starring Ali Wong and Randall Park. "It was a real challenge, and I liked that," she tells 12DOVE when we sit down to discuss her new movie over Zoom, describing the script as "Back to the Future meets Scream."
Totally Killer follows 16-year-old Jamie, played by Kiernan Shipka, whose mother, Pam (Julie Bowen) was the only survivor of a serial killer who targeted her high school friendship group in 1987. After the killer strikes again in the present day, Jamie travels back in time to try and stop the Sweet Sixteen Killer once and for all. Now thrust back to the '80s, she tries to infiltrate teen Pam (Olivia Holt)'s mean girl clique and change the course of history, but time – and the killer – has other ideas…
"An element that was really subtle, but subversive, was the idea of Jamie at the center," Khan tells us. "She's being hunted because there's a killer on the loose, and he's hunting these other young women, but she's driving the action. She's the one who's armed with all this information, and she's gonna go stop him. She's hunting him, in a way. Even if it's a subconscious thing, there's something powerful about it."
Teenage tragicomedy
The director praises Shipka's ability to balance the comedy and tragedy of the film, which "gives it a center and an emotional heart that grounds it". Her performance – and the movie's script – delicately walks the line between a realistic portrayal of a teenage girl while still making sure the audience roots for her. "That, to me, is where comedy lives: the idea that you can be a good person and not be good all the time," she says. "Everybody has bad moments, everybody has bad days, so that is relatable. The thing that was tragic in this story, which she's trying to rectify, is that you don't know when you'll have your last exchange with somebody. You can be casually cruel in an offhanded way and then regret that forever. Having a chance to go back and fix it is quite a powerful drive."
Jamie travels back in time with her best friend's science fair project: a ramshackle old photobooth with a few, uh, adjustments. "We wanted the visual element to be a little bit lo-fi," Khan explains. "She's traveling in a photobooth, so it's not going to be like… Avatar. They're high school kids, so how would they access this? You have to buy that time travel is possible, but it can look a little more DIY than super-slick."
Time traveling true crime
While the time travel may be the most outlandish part of the movie, there's a public obsession with the high-profile murder cases that feels a lot closer to home. In the present, the Sweet Sixteen Killer's likeness is replicated in Halloween costumes, with locals donning the murderer's trademark mask, while a true crime podcaster runs tours of the murder spots. With the current true crime media landscape, Khan says that it felt natural to bring that element into a modern-day slasher movie – especially one that involves time travel. "If you and I somehow got a time machine and we were gonna go back to stop the Manson murders, we'd know exactly when they went to the first house," she posits. "So, with that knowledge, we can go back and – we would think – be able to stop it. And then the trick is, we can't. Can you stop something that's already happened? Does anybody believe us? All those kinds of questions come into play with the time travel element."
In this universe, the killer's distinctive rubber mask, with blond hair and white teeth, is a Halloween costume staple, even 35 years later, so Khan explains that she wanted a design that was both period-specific for the '80s yet still resonant in the present-day. "When we were working on the mask design, we landed on the idea of a handsome man being terrifying," she says. "We started pulling '80s heartthrob references: Dolph Lundgren, Rob Lowe, and Kiefer Sutherland, with The Lost Boys touch with the earring. The big teeth, a perfect white-tooth smile, to me, bridged both eras."
What it all comes back to, though, is Jamie and Pam's relationship. "That's just the emotional heart of the movie," Khan says. "We wanted to keep that alive because that's the whole reason that Jamie is [in the '80s] and doing what she's doing. We wanted to remind people of the connection and find the moments in the movie to hit that again, and to say, 'What would you do if you were sitting across from your mom when you were both 16 years old?'" she continues, before laughing. "The added comedy on top of that is, 'And your mom hates you, for no reason.' We just thought it was funny that her mom doesn't like her." And that pretty much sums up Totally Killer: heartfelt, without taking itself too seriously. Photobooth time machine and all.
Totally Killer is out now on Prime Video. For more, check out our guide to the best upcoming horror movies to fill out your watch list.
