Totally Killer has it all: horror, comedy, time travel – and a new generation of final girl.
Kiernan Shipka stars in the new movie as Jamie Hughes, an average teen who lives in a small town that is still rattled 35 years after a trio of unsolved murders committed by the masked Sweet Sixteen Killer.
The victims were all close friends of Jamie’s now overprotective mother Pam (Julie Bowen), who ends up suffering the same fate minutes into the movie. Despondent, Jamie decides to travel back in time to 1987 via her friend’s science fair time machine to take out the killer and thereby right the present.
Director Nahnatchka Khan says that Jamie is a very modern heroine – the next-gen evolution of horror scream queens in the mold of Scream’s Sidney Prescott. "This girl is an unassuming main character that has surprising depth and drive that you don’t normally see at the center of movies like this anymore," she tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which features The Exorcist: Believer on the cover.
"That was really important to me. For this movie, the idea of taking somebody like Jamie and having her be victimized, but also then drive the story momentum and be the one who refuses to stop, is notoriously something that’s been ascribed to male characters in film. It’s done like a Trojan horse. You have a lot of fun and a lot of elements that are at play so you don’t necessarily realize that this woman will not be stopped."
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And, on top of the whole trying-to-stop-a-serial-killer thing, Gen Z-er Jamie also has to navigate the social norms of high school in the '80s. "It’s like [Jamie] is going into a John Hughes movie, which to us was a very funny dichotomy," Khan says of the conflicts that ensue. "We’re not commenting on who’s right or who’s wrong, or who’s better or who’s worse. It’s just that in ’87, nobody knows what the fuck Jamie is talking about!"
Totally Killer releases on October 6 on Prime Video. For more, check out our guide to the other best upcoming horror movies on the way in 2023 and beyond.
The above is just a snippet of our interview, available in the latest issue of SFX Magazine, which features The Exorcist: Believer on the cover and is available on newsstands from Wednesday, October 4. For even more from SFX, sign up for the newsletter, sending all the latest exclusives straight to your inbox.
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