Everyone deserves at least one scare on Halloween — or at least leading up to the infamous holiday. October is already upon us, and a new slasher film just dropped on Prime Video with a talented cast including Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men), Julie Bowen (Modern Family), and Randall Park (WandaVision). Directed by Nahnatchka Khan (Fresh Off the Boat, Always Be My Maybe), Totally Killer uniquely blends a variety of film genres and subgenres, including horror, comedy, sci-fi, and true-crime.

Shipka plays Jamie, a teen grieving the recent loss of a family member to the dreaded “Sweet 16 Killer,” who has returned to their small town 35 years after first wreaking havoc on the community. Jamie stumbles across a time machine (yes, a time machine) and quite literally travels back to that fateful night of the first killings. It’s a hoot from start to finish as she navigates the “un-woke” ’80s culture and more.

We recently caught up with Totally Killer producers Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath, plus director of photography Judd Overton in separate interviews to learn about the creative process behind their new film and future Blumhouse projects that are in the works.

Producing a ‘Comedy-Forward’ Horror Feature

Serial killers. Halloween. Time machines. The ’80s. No, this isn’t a Back to the Future holiday horror special. Totally Killer is a unique combination of these elements that will guarantee thrills all the way through, a viewing experience best consumed with your pals. “I love that it’s comedy-forward with horror,” said Gilreath. “It’s really inviting. It invites a non-horror audience to come watch the movie and experience maybe a new genre to them or something they’ve told themselves, ‘I don’t like horror movies, That’s too scary. I don’t like the blood.’ And I think this gives a lot of permission to those people to hopefully expand a genre audience a bit.” He continued:

I really love the sort of subversion of nostalgia where I think people now, even young people, have a nostalgia for the ’80s because we have the music, we have TV, and we have films and all that kind of stuff. And I love the idea of sending a modern teenager back to the ’80s, and getting there and being kind of horrified at how awful it is.

Hendricks continued regarding the infamous ’80s and how a pro young actor like Shipka fits in well with calling out the un-woke nature back then. “I just think it’s so funny that when we watch an ’80s film, but also a ’90s film and be like, ‘How did they get away with that at that time?’ That happens all the time,” explained Hendricks. “And I love that we didn’t blink on this, that we actually tried to put all that type of humor and jokes into this film and just had Kiernan having to react to it. I love that there’s a character that talks about how he drives better when he’s drunk. It just seems so out of place today.”

Back to the 1980s
Prime Video

And that “comedy-forward” nature of Totally Killer is something director Khan embraced thanks to her background in other hilarious projects, some of which DP Overton has also worked on. “We’ve done a lot of TV shows together, Young Rock and worked on Fresh Off the Boat together,” he told us. Overton continued:

“When I got the script, this blend of slasher and comedy, finding the right tone — I knew from the start that was going to be the real thing to discover. And Nahnatchka was fantastic. She’s very collaborative and really invites that kind of dialogue. And we did a lot of research. We watched a lot of those kinds of older ’80s, ’90s horror movies, also trying to work out the difference: ‘How are we going to set the tone and differentiate the contemporary look from the ’80s look?'”

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Setting up the tone certainly becomes less daunting by embracing some cinematic classics that helped lay the groundwork for the slasher subgenre. “The benchmark is the original Halloween,” says Overton. “And when you go back and look at it, it’s not super scary, but what it does is really set a good tone, and the score is incredible. And those kinds of empty shots of watching and waiting, it feels bigger than it is because it kind of sets up this world.” Overton continued:

And then we looked at a lot of contemporary stuff as well. Scream is another one, we actually refer to that [within the film], in sort of having a balance of delivering the frights and the jumps and really the level of gore. I think that we knew we had to deliver for the horror fans.

Unique Scares That ‘Really Up the Ante’
Prime Video

Halloween has a number of scares during the daytime, if you might recall, and Totally Killer takes on that unique challenge as well. Remember waterbeds from back in the day? Just wait for a daytime murder involving one of those in the new Prime Video feature. Plus, Modern Family star Julie Bowen, playing Shipka’s mom, has an epic scene involving the killer. Overton detailed the scene to us:

Julie Bowen was fantastic. She did 90% of that fight scene herself. I think there’s a couple of beats that it’s like, ‘You don’t need to take that hit.’ But she was really up for it. So that was incredible. And it means that you can shoot so much more of the actor really doing it and really being thrown around.

“It feels visceral because you can just see the act of doing it,” explained Overton, who wanted to create unique horror action comedy with scenes like these. “We’re trying to really up the ante. The first one, obviously, is such a surprise, and we really want it to feel like they’re kind of Mr. and Mr. Smith, something you’re rooting for, Atomic Blonde or something. We really wanted the audience to feel like Julie’s gonna make it, this is gonna be a really short film, because she’s gonna kick his ass.”

Related: Totally Killer Review: A Highly Entertaining Time Travel Slasher Movie

Totally Killer also branches out from the slasher stuff, with some science-fiction sequences as Shipka’s character stumbles upon that aforementioned time machine. “The most challenging and the most exciting is that quantum drop, the Gravitron,” said Overton. “When I read that on the page, I was like, ‘This is amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it, and how are we going to do that?’ So that took a lot of workshopping, and a lot of breaking the scene down into exactly the beats we needed.

“Also, we only had the Gravitron for a certain amount of time, and it ended up being like the very last thing we shot,” continued Overton. “And we had to work out if it could even be filmed inside the Gravitron. It’s a very small space, and it’s very precise engineering. You’re not allowed to mess with anything in that space because it has to carry human cargo.”

Looking ahead, producers Hendricks and Gilreath remain busy with future Blumhouse features and other related projects. “Our other Amazon film, House of Spoils, is going to come out next year,” Hendricks told us. “That one’s really exciting. It’s like a completely different direction, a chef losing her mind in upstate New York.” Gilreath calls it a “Ratatouille / Black Swan sort of mashup.”

Plus, Hendricks added that they’re going into production on M3GAN 2 at the top of next year, which he’s certainly excited about. “And we’re also doing a Faces of Death movie, if you remember from the underground VHS video world,” Gilreath added. “We’re doing the film with Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery as the leads.”

But in the meantime, Totally Killer is now available for streaming on Prime Video.