While Nahnatchka Khan might be best known for comedy, Totally Killer proves that she has the, well, killer instinct for blending her wicked sense of humor with horror.
Khan is a luminary in the comedy world with such enviable credits under her belt as Fresh Off the Boat and Malcolm in the Middle, and her feature directorial debut Always Be My Maybe. Now she’s taking her incisive and witty POV to a new, darker genre. The shift makes sense, as Khan is a lifelong horror fan herself. “I found it relaxing in a way,” she tells PRIDE. “When I wanted to just like chill out, there was nothing better than to watch Conjuring or something like that, and kind of just check out.”
So when the opportunity to do a horror comedy presented itself courtesy of Jason Blum and his production company Blumhouse, Khan jumped at the chance. “Anything I do will always have a streak of comedy in it. But I liked the idea [of doing a horror film],” she says. “I mean, Scream is one of my most favorite movies of all time. So I liked the idea of doing a mash-up. And so then when they sent the script everything seemed to click and make sense.”
Totally Killer was indeed the perfect vehicle for Khan’s light-hearted but socially conscious brand of comedy. The film follows a young woman named Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) whose mother Pam (Julie Bowen) was the sole survivor of a masked killer attack in the ’80s. When he returns 30 years later to finish the job, Jamie ends up escaping him... in a time machine... which sends her back to the ‘80s in time for her to stop the original killings before they can even occur. To do so, she has to team up with the teenage, mean girl version of her mother (Olivia Holt) before it’s too late. What ensues is a mashup of fish-out-of-water comedy and a good old-fashioned ‘80s slasher. It’s a lot of elements to blend, but Khan manages to keep the plates spinning, the jokes landing, and the blood flowing. In other words, it’s a delight for horror and comedy fans alike — and a film only she could make.
It’s very exciting that Khan even had the opportunity to make this foray into the genre at all. The horror comedy space is one that, with a few notable exceptions (Cocaine Bear, Slaxx, Prevenge), has largely been dominated by male directors. Khan deviates from that by being a queer woman of color, and that unique perspective shines through, refreshing the story while lovingly poking fun at the aspects of the slasher genre that just don’t hit the same today. “I think it’s part of the comedic lens of the whole movie,” she explains. “We unpack a lot of the stuff that was like, okay, in the ‘80s that now looking back with 2023 lens doesn’t hold up, doesn’t play.”
“One of those things that was fun for us was the sex trope and the slasher movies,” Khan continues explaining how focusing on the girls’ perspectives switches up the regressive sexual politics of slashers of yore. “It was fun for us to go into the Molly’s [sex lives] and have them talk about sex in a way that we hadn’t really heard. There’s this whole [running joke] where this one character hates giving blow jobs, and it keeps coming back. You just don’t hear girls talk about things like that [in horror movies]. And it just feels real.”
Khan also wanted to explore what it means to be a final girl in a more modern sense in the film, by juxtaposing the Jamie and Pam characters. “One of the subtle elements we want to do is almost a handoff from the classic final girl that adult Pam plays at the beginning of the movie, to her daughter. Pam in the movie has had 35 years of being the only survivor, being the final girl, having to experience this trauma, so much so that she gave that to her daughter, just trying to keep her safe and trying to protect her. But in doing so kind of passed on the intergenerational trauma of the whole experience,” explains Khan. One of the ways she modernizes the final girl is by, in essence, flipping the predator-prey dynamic. “You’re following Jamie — in the classic slasher movies, the young woman is always hunted, and she is here too like, there is a killer on the loose, killing young women. He’s after her. But Jamie is the one that’s pushing the story forward. She’s actually hunting him,” adds Khan.
While Khan certainly brings a comedic POV to the film, she also turns a queer lens on the proceedings. Now, there’s nothing textually queer in the film, but there is a spirit of queerness that pervades the film. That, according to Khan, is just a natural outcome of her filmmaking. “There’s like a little bit of camp and a lot of things that I do just inherently because as a queer person telling stories, that’s the lens that I see the world through,” she explains. “That’s what I find funny. So there are heightened elements in a world that has heightened concepts. So, you’ve got the Mollies, which are heightened versions of Molly Ringwald, borrowing from Heathers which is also camp. You’ve got the Totally Killer mask in and of itself, with that dangling earring, that’s like Lost Boys, which is also camp.
There’s a lot of homoeroticism and Lost Boys. There’s things for me as a filmmaker and as a storyteller that I love and that I gravitate towards. And for me the idea of camp and horror just are so natural too.”
