Totally Killer director talks new Blumhouse slasher-comedy that’s "Back to the Future meets Scream"

Oct. 6, 2023

Exclusive: Director Nahnatchka Khan on true crime, time travel, and Kiernan Shipka’s final girl

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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

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.”

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.”

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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 bestupcoming horror moviesto fill out your watch list.

I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.

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