A Totally Killer Time With Nahnatchka Khan

Kiernan Shipka has to get back in time in sci fi slasher comedy Totally Killer, streaming now on Prime Video (Courtesy of Prime Video)

It's said that comedy and horror sit on either side of a blurred border, but it's pretty clear which side Totally Killer director Nahnatchka Khan comes from.

The time-travelling slasher spoof, which premiered at Fantastic Fest before arriving on Prime Video this weekend, is Khan's first excursion into horror. Well, unless you count writing two episodes of What's New, Scooby Doo?. With a background as a writer on shows like Malcolm in the Middle and American Dad!, then moving into directing with Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 and Fresh Off the Boat, she brings the humor to the mayhem.

However, she's teamed up with a rising genre legend: Kiernan Shipka. The Fantastic Fest veteran (for February, later released as The Blackcoat's Daughter) and star of Flowers in the Attic and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina plays Jamie, a modern teen who is sent back to 1988 to track down the Sweet 16 Killer who butchered her mom's friends.

Austin Chronicle: So many time-travel movies, the characters are blissfully unaware of time-travel movies and all the tropes. This time, Jamie literally goes, 'So, you've seen Back to the Future?

Nahnatchka Khan: Yes! We're all aware! Sometimes there are movies were the characters don't feel like they exist in the real world, because we're all consumed media. If a person from 2023 is going back in time, I'm not a quantum scientist so I can't have a chalkboard moment where I'm explaining time travel. So just the idea of referencing media and entertainment cuts through everything and circumvents any questions.

AC: Bears Fonte, who founded the Other Worlds Film Festival, is obsessed with time-travel movies, and has this idea that there's a sliding scale. At one end, there's movies like Back to the Future, which don't make scientific sense but the story emotionally works, while at the other there's Primer, where the science is air tight. Where would you put Totally Killer?

NK: Definitely more to the Back to the Future side of that scale. I think, for us, the idea is acknowledging what has come before in a way that makes sense, but also acknowledging what we don't know. Jamie even has a joke, when someone asks her about quantum physics, about how she saw Endgame but didn't quite understand it.

So I think embracing the idea of knowing superficial ideas of time travel is the level we're doing. No one's disappearing, there's not that disappearing photograph, but she's aware. She's just doesn't know if she can interact with people on a certain level, what that's going to do to the future. So for us it was cool to be able to cut back to 2023 and show that in real time – the idea of the Mandela effect, and to speak about it philosophically, rather than straight sci fi.

Totally Killer director Nahnatchka Khan (r) with Fantastic Fest director of programming Annick Manhert and the Sweet Sixteen Killer(s) at the film's world premiere at Fantastic Fest (Photo by Jack Plunkett)

AC: And all time-travel movies are inherently period pieces, with all the challenges that implies. Part of what worked with Stranger Things was that it really felt like the era, and not this Nagel-prints-everywhere fantasy.

NK: Yeah, it's not an MTV music video. That was important.

AC: You definitely have some big hair in there.

NK: Oh, some big hair. But it's to make it grounded. The joke is not, as filmmakers in 2023, we're making fun of the '80s. The wardrobe, the cars, the makeup, everything is going to be '80s, but they're just living their lives. They have no idea. So the joke is not, 'Let's laugh at the eye shadow.'

AC: Jamie's culture shock is not in, 'Why are you wearing that jacket?' It's in, 'You're allowed to do this? How did any of you survive?' And having grown up in that era, I look back and have to say – I don't know either.

NK: That's right. We should have been dead a thousand times over.

AC: Lead paint everywhere. Teachers who would just go, 'Eh, sort it out yourselves.'

NK: 'Who cares?' You can't do anything now without a thousand questions and filling out forms. We're all so worried about identity theft, but back then you could just turn up at school and go, 'My name is Joe and I'm here to enroll in school.' 'OK, here's your schedule. Good luck.'

AC: Were there any '80s Easter eggs you snuck in, just for you?

NK: There were so many. The acknowledgement of John Hughes in that era was important. Also for me, the idea of PE shorts being so short in the '80s was important for me to call out in the dodgeball sequence.

AC: Forty years from now, someone is going to make a time-travel piece coming back to now, and they'll have to explain Lululemon and super-tight workout gear. 'Why is everyone wearing full-body compression socks?'

NK: 'Is everybody injured?' And as for the shorts, the school sanctioned it.

AC: Not just sanctioned, mandated!

NK: Right! They're school issue. That's why Kiernan says, 'It all looks like we work at Hooters."

AC: And another thing you do that I've never seen in a time-travel movie. The great thing about period pieces is that they remove all the modern technology that complicates story telling, but Jamie still has her cell phone.

NK: There are so many movies of the time that would not work now because we all have cell phones in our pockets.

I had so many conversations about what time it should say on Jamie's cellphone when she time travels. She goes back 35 years and eight hours, so what time should it say on the phone? And the phone battery is draining, because you go somewhere with no cell service but your battery is still draining.

AC: It becomes a very subtle ticking clock. Not only does she need to stop the murders before they happen, but she has to get back ...

NK: Or she's stuck there forever. Yeah, and it's tied to the phone and the battery.

Kiernan Shipka as an unlikely time traveler who has to stop a mass murderer in sci fi horror comedy Totally Killer, now streaming on Prime Video. The film received its world premiere at this year's Fantastic Fest. (Image Courtesy of Prime Video)

AC: And you have the perfect actor for this kind of material with Kiernan.

NK: I can't imagine anyone else in this part. Kiernan's had so much experience, in every genre that she's worked in since she was a baby on Mad Men, but she walks on the set and she's so open in the moment. So you get the best of both worlds: you get someone with all this experience and knows what they're doing but also completely available to figure out this character, workshop this moment, and is willing to work on that level and collaborate. She's a genius. I love her.

AC: It's that pursed brow she gets that just screams, 'Why are you people to stupid?'

NK: You can see the internal question and judgement, and she doesn't verbalize it. Sometimes I'd be talking with Kiernan about the script and the pages for the day, and she'll get that look on her face. I'm like, 'She's either rehearsing, or I'm not making sense.'

Totally Killer

Fantastic Fest
World Premiere
Streaming now on Prime Video