This interview was conducted out of Fantastic Fest, and contains spoilers for Prime Video’s Totally Killer.
In this house we love and support teen girl horror, which means I absolutely had to sit down and chat with Totally Killer’s director Nahnatchka Khan. Known for her work on sitcoms and the popular romcom Always Be My Maybe, Khan sat for interviews on the final day of Fantastic Fest 2023 to discuss her first foray into the genre.
The best part of festival interviews — particularly at Fantastic Fest — is that you have a little bit more time to sit down and get to know the subject. For this interview, I headed up to one of the karaoke rooms above the Highball bar in the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar where Khan was waiting with a chipper attitude and a bag full of breakfast tacos. The chipper attitude is noteworthy because it was day eight of the festival, and I, personally, was sucking down a sugar-free Redbull like my life (and subsequent interviews) depended on it. The breakfast tacos are noteworthy because they’re breakfast tacos. (They were Torchy’s. I didn’t partake, but they were generously offered multiple times.)
Totally Killer follows Jamie Hughes (Kiernan Shipka) as she finds herself on a time travel misadventure while in a fight to save her future against the Sweet Sixteen Killer. In my review — and in every conversation I’ve had about the movie since — I’ve described the film as Scream meets Disney Channel Original Movie. Some of the aspects of the film have the delightful hokeyness of the early ‘00s DCOMs (particularly during the time travel moments), but those kitschy vibes are blissfully absent in the ‘80s themselves. So often, the time period is reduced to a caricature of itself. For Totally Killer, it was important that things felt authentic.
“I think because we have seen a lot of eighties — certainly eighties comedy — be over the top and sort of just be exaggerated,” says Khan. “I really wanted it to feel lived in. These people are living like you and I are living. We’re not jokey versions of it. We’re like, that’s how it is. So our costume designer [Patricia J. Henderson] went to vintage stores and just found items from that era that felt real and lived in that kids would actually wear instead of us as filmmakers in 2023 or whatever trying to make fun of them because that’s not the joke.”
The Mask
The slasher mask was of particular importance to Khan and her team. “Obviously, slasher movies, so much of it lives and dies by the mask, and so it’s got to have the presence. It’s got to feel terrifying. It’s got to feel original,” Khan points out.
Rob Lowe, Kiefer Sutherland, Dolf Lundgren, and more were inspirations behind crafting the perfect serial killer mask — of which I jokingly referred to as “the Chad mask.”
“That’s right. Exactly,” Khan laughs. “He had to be blonde, we know that. And then we were able to pull a bunch of eighties heartthrob references from the time, and Tony Gardner, who has done a bunch of mask design for different movies and his team at Alterian, they started to do compilations and composites. And then we were like, ‘what’s the right look…’ The earring, bringing in that sort of little Lost Boys element […] and there’s something about the smile too.”
Time Travel Is Hard…
Time travel is notoriously a pain to make work in stories. How many months did folks spend digging into the perceived plot holes of Avengers: Endgame? (It was a lot.) The solution here is, of course, to make fun of yourself from the beginning. If your script fully understands that time travel stories are filled with nonsense problems that never really end up making total sense and pokes a little fun at itself, you earn yourself a lot of good will.
“Look, we’ve all seen time travel movies. Let’s acknowledge that and let’s try to use reference points that other people will understand. And then if they don’t, you try your best to get your point across,” Khan laughs.
“But then also talking philosophically about time was fun for us. Sort of the Mandela effect and the idea of a stream running and jumping out of the river, going upstream or whatever. The stream still moves, but it just changes little things throughout. That was important to sort of, again, not get bogged down with the actual how is time travel working? But also what I liked is showing the effects of it in our movie, too.”
Because Totally Killer continues to take place in both timelines after Jamie stumbles into the past, Khan and team were able to showcase these little changes in real time. “There’s an element to our movie where she tries to get a message to her friend,” Khan points out, referencing Jamie using her time travel movie knowledge to get a message back to her bestie Amelia (Kelcey Mawema). In both playing with little moments like that and never taking itself too seriously, Totally Killer really shines.
A Killer Time
It may be a horror comedy, but Totally Killer never forgets that it’s a slasher first. When Pam Hughes (Julie Bowen) is fighting for her life as the Sweet Sixteen killer’s first modern day attack, writers David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D’Angelo (alongside Khan’s directing) really help us believe that Pam is going to come out of the other side of the attack alive. After watching her friends all get killed in the ‘80s, Pam learned everything she could about self defense and tried to teach her daughter a modicum of precaution (teens, amirite). Survival may not have ultimately been in the cards for the first iteration of present-day Pam, but it was still important to bring the suspense and ultimately honor the character.
“I think that since this is the first big kill of the movie, we wanted that to feel like a real surprise and to feel like we were honoring that character and this woman who’s been terrified her whole life,” Khan explains. “She can make it. She’s been preparing for that. She hoped this day would never come, but if it did come, she was ready.”
Unfortunately, readiness only gets you so far sometimes.
Still, Julie Bowen was an absolute champ! Khan pointed out that not only was she a trooper through the whole process, but that she did nearly all of her own stunts as well. “There’s only two things she didn’t want to do, which was get thrown through a coffee table and a concrete countertop or whatever. Everything else it’s her and she really worked with the stunt team and yeah, it was amazing. It was really fun.”
As for Khan’s favorite kill to shoot? Keep an eye out for the cat and mouse scene that unfolds in the mountain cabin.
Totally Killer is available on Prime Video now.
Some quotes have been edited or condensed for clarity.
Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She’s also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia
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