Totally Killer Director on Tackling Horror and Changing Harry Styles’ Timeline
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The post Totally Killer Director on Tackling Horror and Changing Harry Styles’ Timeline appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Totally Killer.]
Once all the slashing is done and the day is saved in the Blumhouse production Totally Killer, teenage Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) finally has a chance to breathe in the present, and figure out how, exactly, she just changed her original timeline by traveling back to 1987. And it turns out she didn’t just save her mother (Julie Bowen) from a brutal slaying, but… Harry Styles’ career is different?
This is according to director Nahnatchka Khan, who laughs as she reflects on the notebook written by Jamie’s best friend’s mother Lauren (Kimberly Huie), who’s Jamie’s only guide to the differences with her new reality. “There’s stuff that didn’t really make it onto the screen, that we were just talking about, that was in that book. Like somebody in the art department got obsessed with how Harry Styles’s career would have been different because of what Jamie did.”
The connection, Khan says, is “convoluted,” but involves how nascent rocker Eddie Royal (Tate Chernen)’s band changed in the new reality: “There was some connection from A Waterbed Away to One Direction in there. There are so many supplemental materials that we can put out about how Totally Killer’s timeline affects Harry Styles.”
Harry Styles’ new path in life is just one of the details that couldn’t make it to the screen, as part of the film’s cheeky conclusion. It’s a tonally apt end for the horror comedy, a genre that can be a tonally tricky one, because the balance between the two genres can be hard to calibrate.
Khan says that the approach that worked for her was “not starting from a place of moodiness and darkness, but leading with the comedy first, so that those scares and those slasher kills can land. And then not checking your swing when you go to those kills. That’s not where you play the comedy — like, the comedy comes from these surrounding things and creating a space where all those things are possible at the same time.”
“And then, also,” she says, “time travel.”
As Khan notes, time travel stories in pop culture are quite prevalent. “We’ve seen it so many times and there’s so many versions of it. And now we have, like, the multiverse, so it’s not even like one timeline. Everything’s happening at once and there’s alt versions of us at all times. So like, I think for us it was just having a little fun with elements of a genre that’s been well explored, and acknowledging that like if we went back in the past… Like, if I had to go back, I’m not a scientist, I’m not a physicist. I’m not Oppenheimer. I wouldn’t be able to explain how [time travel] works, but I can be like, ‘Have you seen Back to the Future?’ Using those touchstones of pop culture as our way to cut through a lot of that stuff made sense.”
Especially since the alternative is trying to explain some very difficult science. In the film, Khan reflects, Jamie “has a reference there where her friend is like, ‘What do you know about quantum mechanics?’ And she’s like, ‘Well, I saw Endgame, but I didn’t understand it.’ That really encapsulates my relationship with quantum physics.”
Khan’s background as a creator has primarily been in the world of TV comedy, creating the broadcast series Don’t Trust the B in Apt. 23, Fresh Off the Boat, and Young Rock. However, she’s a longtime horror fan as well, which meant she immediately said yes when Jason Blum and the Blumhouse team called her in for a general meeting after the release of her debut feature, Always Be My Maybe.
“I got to go in and fan out to them and just be like, ‘I love what you guys do. I love the risks you take. I love that you make all kinds of movies and all kinds of projects,'” she says. “It kind of just went from there.” “There” meaning that a few years later, she was sent David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D’Angelo’s script for the film.
Totally Killer (Prime Video)
Always Be My Maybe was, of course, a romantic comedy. Yet while Totally Killer was her first time directing real horror sequences, Khan says that “there’s so much prep that goes into it that on the day, you feel more than ready. You’re almost like, did we shoot this already? Pre-vis stunt work with the stunt team and meetings with the practical effects guys, really sort of walking through each sequence.”
For the film’s first kill, Khan says she and cinematographer Judd Overton shot that handheld so “it feels very visceral and close, so you feel scared. And then going into the ’80s, and then doing kind of these more slasher kills, each one feeling different.”
It all comes together in a funny yet scary package, and Khan’s thrilled for people to see it. “We shot this last summer, and it was obviously always meant to be a Halloween spooky season release. So knowing that there was no way we were going to make last Halloween, we just kind of waited. And once we delivered the movie, it was like, ‘I can’t wait for this to be out there and for people to see it.’ It’s a fun wild ride.”
Adds Khan, “I think it’s a fun group watch, and I’m excited that it’s on streaming on Amazon so people can watch together. It’s rated R but I feel like, you know, 14-year-olds…” She laughs. “I mean, who doesn’t like some light blowjob jokes? I think that plays.”
Totally Killer is stabbing now on Prime Video.
Totally Killer Director on Tackling Horror and Changing Harry Styles’ Timeline
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