(L-R): Olivia Holt, Charlie Gillespie, Kiernan Shipka, Stephi Chin-Salvo, Jeremy Monn-Djasngar in ‘Totally Killer.’
James Dittiger/Prime Video
‘Totally Killer’ Is a Time-Travel Slasher With a Brand New Final Girl
Ever wish Back to the Future was more like Scream? Was your main beef with Halloween: “Hmm, not enough time travel?” Then Totally Killer is for you.
Amazon‘s glossiest, wildest new horror-comedy finds Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) reeling after her mother (Julie Bowen) is murdered by a masked menace known as the “Sweet Sixteen Killer.” Thirty-five years earlier, the same murderer went on a killing spree in her town, leaving her mom the sole survivor of a group of teen friends. Luckily, her best friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) just finished building a time machine for the science fair, which allows Jamie to travel back to when the first murders occurred and team up with her teenage mom (Olivia Holt) in an effort to save everyone.
Director Nahnatchka Khan is a fitting leader for this wacky horror flick with a heart, having blended comedy and drama so seamlessly in her ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, and gone hilariously camp in her short-lived TV series Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, in which party girl Chloe (Krysten Ritter) tries to scam unsuspecting roommates out of their cash by terrorizing them out of their rental agreements with help from her BFF, James Van Der Beek — who plays himself.
Khan caught up with Rolling Stone before Totally Killer‘s Oct. 6 premiere on Amazon to discuss serial killers, final girls, and how she would have wanted Don’t Trust the B to end.
Tell me a little bit about how this project came to you.
Nahnatchka Khan: The last movie that I directed was this rom-com called Always Be My Maybe. I had a general meeting off of that with Jason Blum and his team at Blumhouse; I’ve also been a horror fan. And then they sent me Totally Killer. Once I got locked into the premise I was so excited. I was like, “Oh, I feel like I can have a lot of fun with this.” You know, the slasher horror, time travel, the Eighties, there’s a lot of balls in the air here and I felt like it’d be a fun challenge.
What are some of your all-time favorite horror movies?
Khan: I love The Conjuring universe. I think the first two Conjuring movies are genius. Especially that first one — it’s just really confident and it takes its time. And then there’s just like the classic ones. I love the original Halloween. The original Friday the 13th.
I feel like slashers have come back over the last few years — with all the big series getting new chapters and movies like yours premiering. Why do you think that is?
Khan: Those franchises really are sort of evergreen. People have been inspired and have come up with great ways to continue [those series]. They still feel fresh and surprising. But I think, honestly, there’s something about serial killers in general that society can’t get enough of and I think slasher movies are heightened versions of that. There’s just something fascinating to us about horrific people doing these terrible things.
Slashers seemed to be at their most popular during eras when there were more serial killers. It’s interesting to bring that back today when they seem more rare.
Khan: We touched on it for comedy in my movie, how the evolution of technology has prevented more serial killers. Because back in the day, people were just driving across state lines and giving fake names and getting jobs like, you know, installing stereo equipment in someone’s house or something like that. It was so easy to kind of fly under the radar and do bad things back then.
Did you have any actors in mind when you first saw the script?
Khan: Kiernan was at the top of all of our lists: Blumhouse, Amazon, we all were fans of hers. I had worked with Kiernan very briefly. Like 10 years earlier, she had done a guest spot on the first show that I created called Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23.
I remember that! She was helping James Van Der Beek study for a role.
Khan: That’s right. They were observing each other for a body swap movie. And she was so funny; she was like 12 back then. So when I met her on this, I was like, “I don’t know if you’re going to remember, but we worked together briefly about 10 years ago.” She was like, “Of course, I remember!” She’s so professional because she’s done this for so long. But she’s just got the ability to play things on so many different levels.
And the rest of the cast is so perfect, too. All of them come from a teen show: Olivia Holt from Cruel Summer, Charlie Gillespie from Julie and the Phantoms, Lochlyn Munro from Riverdale.
Khan: Olivia sent in her audition and she just blew us all away because she was so the embodiment of that John Hughes-alpha, head cheerleader kind of vibe from the movies of that era. But in a way that was funny and not hateable. And Lochlyn [who plays Jamie’s dad] — that was really important, too. Because, you know, part of this movie is it’s a whodunit, right? So we’re sort of populating the world with suspects. And there’s something about Lochlyn, when I see his face, immediately I’m like, “He could be a suspect.”
You’ve got a movie here where time travel is reasonable, but your main character is dealing with a very real tragedy. How did you balance all that?
Khan: When Jamie’s mom is murdered in the present, at the top of our movie, that is the inciting incident for her. And that’s something that Kiernan did so amazingly well: remind us of that. Once we get into the Eighties, and the fun and games begin, it would have been very easy to sort of lose sight of that inciting incident and the fact that it is so traumatic and tragic and devastating. That’s the emotional bond at the center of the movie, the mother-daughter relationship.
When the trailer came out, I remember a lot of people comparing your movie to 2015’s The Final Girls, where a girl loses her mother, who is screen queen, and then magically enters one of her Eighties movies. Obviously, these movies are different in a lot of ways, but have you seen The Final Girls?
Khan: I have seen that movie; I think it’s a great movie. It’s very different from ours; that one, to me, feels more like it owes a nod to The Last Action Hero. You know what I mean? Like getting sucked back into a movie. Ours is more like Back to the Future. But the idea of the final girl is something that exists in the genre. Pam has been living with this trauma. She’s the final girl of her group of friends. She’s been the sole survivor for 35 years, but she’s lived with that guilt and been prepared that anything could happen. And she handed that down to her daughter, she gave her all these tools. And then it kind of comes back into play, and the daughter is now forced into the mom’s story. That’s an interesting handoff for the final girl idea.
How have you seen the final girl trope change over the years?
Khan: I think the progression in the genre was inevitable — starting from “the babysitter’s being killed” slashers and then really giving these women more agency. With a lot of these new movies, and certainly with this one, something that was appealing to me was the idea that even though Jamie is being hunted, and there is a vicious killer on the loose, she’s actually kind of hunting him. She’s propelling the story in a way that feels new to me because she will not stop until she stops him. That unrelenting drive of this young woman who’s at the center of this movie just feels like a new kind of shade on that idea of a final girl.
What was it like going back to the Eighties as someone who lived through them? And how did the cast react, being younger?
Khan: They love the wardrobe. The hair, you know, it was really fun for them. I think they were down to embrace all of it. They loved that there was no PC Police back then. And there was this lawlessness. There were also a lot of questions about the technology of it all, too. Jeremy, who plays [football player] Randy, said he knew what a Walkman was and then pulled up a picture of a Discman on his phone. And I was like, “No, no, that’s, like, evolution. That’s like Walkman 2.0. We wanted that!”
Did anyone get into any mischief on set?
Khan: Everyone was always karaoke-ing. I was like, “Guys, it’s still hard Covid. Please don’t share a microphone. We’re trying to just finish this movie.” For some reason, also, everybody can sing. Like, Olivia obviously has a pop background. Charlie brought his guitar to set. Actually, part of his audition was singing a Robyn song. It was a fun set. It honestly felt like a singalong could break out at any moment. But meanwhile, serial killers are chasing everybody through the Haunted House of Horrors or whatever. It’s like, “Guys, put the guitars away.”
Also, I have to ask, how would you have liked Don’t Trust the B—- to end? I loved that show.
Khan: Recently, we got into discussions about revisiting that world — like a Christmas movie or something. But I remember thinking that Chloe would definitely have gotten canceled thousands of times over and inserted herself into really bad global situations. You know that picture of Putin with his shirt off on like a boat or something like that? I can see Chloe in the background with a glass of champagne. She wouldn’t be changing, I think. She’d be adapting, not changing.