As far as gimmicky horror movies go, there’s been no shortage since Scream reanimated the genre in 1996. And, in the decades since its initial release, Kevin Williamson effectively gave permission to writers everywhere to be as meta as possible with horror (/comedy horror). Which is why we now have shows such as The Other Black Girl literally calling out in the dialogue how it’s just like the premise of Get Out (and yes, it pretty much is). In Totally Killer, our sort-of final girl, Jamie Hughes (Kiernan Shipka), also has no trouble calling out the cinematic similarities of the plot she’s living through. Specifically, its similarities to Back to the Future and the aforementioned Scream. Mainly the former because Jamie accidentally ends up traveling back to the 80s (October 27, 1987, to be exact) after her best friend, Amelia (Kelcey Mawema), invents a time machine based on her mother Lauren’s (Kimberly Huie) abandoned scrawlings from a high school notebook.
The apparatus used? A photobooth at the abandoned Vernon carnival grounds where the high school science fair is going to be held. When Jamie approaches the desolate, creepy place (called Billy’s Boardwalk) to find Amelia, she can’t help but ask why the principal would want to hold the fair here. Amelia responds matter-of-factly, “Principal Summers got it for free. You know, to help bring people back in. This used to be the place to hang in Vernon, but now it’s just another stop on the murder tour.” And, speaking of the murder tour, it’s a real thing that’s actually run by Chris Dubusage (Jonathan Potts), the self-styled “expert” on the Sweet Sixteen murders that happened in 1987 (basically, he’s sort of the Gale Weathers [Courteney Cox] of the movie). The murders that have made Jamie’s mom, Pam (Julie Bowen), hyper-paranoid and very helicopter parent-y (that’s right, she deliberately smacks of Sidney Prescott [Neve Campbell]). Which is why, when Jamie says she wants to go to a concert with Amelia on Halloween and Pam proceeds to get all protective and foreboding about it, Jamie snaps back, “So I can’t go to a concert because your friends were murdered thirty-five years ago?” Jamie keeps up the harshness by adding, “I sort of wish you guys would just get over it.”
But, obviously, there are many things that both Pam and Jamie’s dad, Blake (Lochlyn Munro), haven’t gotten over since 1987. For Blake, it’s an ongoing contempt for Chris Dubusage and his exploitative ways. For Pam, it isn’t just that her friends were murdered, but also a high-key obsession with Molly Ringwald—hence, dressing as Claire Standish from The Breakfast Club for Halloween. This is no coincidence, as Jamie soon finds out. For her mom’s friend group in high school is referred to as “the Mollys” because they all like to dress in different iterations of her movie characters. This being somewhat ironic considering that Ringwald never played a “popular girl” (save for Claire), favoring instead the underdog characters from the “wrong side of the tracks” (this phrase being literal in Pretty in Pink). Perhaps it was ultimately a sign of Pam’s humanity beneath all the mean girl bravado, what with her role as the leader of the group dictating that Heather (Anna Diaz), Tiffany (Liana Liberato) and Marisa (Stephi Chin-Salvo) should also dress like the “ain’t she sweet” teen queen of the 80s (even though Tiffany is the only redhead). But before unearthing any of that humanity, Jamie is shocked to find out the kind of person her mother was as a teenager after her unexpected bout with time travel. The one caused by being chased into the photo booth by the revived killer (who has already stabbed Jamie’s mom by this point).
When the killer accidentally stabs at the glass plate where the date is displayed, it manages to create the extra metal conduction Amelia was missing to make the time machine work. So it is that Jamie returns to October 27, 1987 (consider it her version of Marty McFly’s November 5, 1955), the date preset by Amelia, who wanted to help Jamie catch the killer from the start so that her mother won’t be murdered in the present. On the other side of time, Jamie is relieved to have evaded the killer, but that relief is gone the instant she realizes (to the initially faint tune of Bananarama’s “Venus”) that she is very much back in 1987.
And, of course, that makes things rife for comedy…which happens to be director Nahnatchka Khan’s specialty (lest anyone forget, she wrote and directed Don’t Trust the B- – – – in Apartment 23…where, incidentally, Kiernan Shipka cameo’d as herself in an episode). Tackling the script by David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver and Jen D’Angelo, Khan visually plays up the shock on Jamie’s part. Not just at having time traveled, but how “problematic” things are in 1987, including the sight of a man wearing an “FBI (Federal Booby Inspector)” shirt at the carnival. When Jamie chastises him for wearing it, his girlfriend notes, “I like your shirt.” Just another indication that the collective mind hadn’t yet been reprogrammed to understand the insidious presence of misogyny in every facet of culture.
Jamie is further appalled when, after asking a woman with two kids what year it is, she offers to give her a ride back to school…where she’s supposed to be at this time of day. Jamie replies, “I can’t get in a car with you, you’re a total stranger. You could be a serial killer.” The woman laughs and says, “Would a serial killer wear Gloria Vanderbilt?” Thus, Jamie rides in the smoke-filled station wagon (another amplification of how different things were back then because a mother was willing to freely suffocate her children with secondhand smoke) to the school. Where she’s met with even more anathema interactions that don’t jibe with her Gen Z perspective. Starting with her sighting of the Vernon “mascot” on the side of the school: a “Red Devil” a.k.a. Native American. She remarks to herself, “And there’s the racism. Knew that was coming.” But with the bad, Jamie takes the good—for instance, a total lack of concern with security on the part of the admin lady she approaches at the front desk with a fake story about being an exchange student from Prince Edward Island. When the woman cuts her off and asks her what grade she’s in so she can give her a catch-all schedule, Jamie asks incredulously, “You don’t need to verify anything?” The woman scoffs, “What is this, Fort Knox?”
Later on, when Jamie needs to figure out what class Amelia’s mom is in, she also approaches the admin lady with the same view she would in the present, figuring that such information can’t be given out because it’s private. But no, the admin lady readily tells her that Lauren is in Earth Science and gets back to reading her romance novel. In disbelief, Jamie notes to herself, “Flying on a plane right now must be insane.”
It is the “insanity” of the 80s overall that Khan and the writers highlight as much as an appreciation for Halloween, Back to the Future and Scream. However, even more significant than that is the racial element that eventually makes itself known by the time the killer is revealed. For the culprit behind the three murders (Pam’s murder thirty-five years later serves as the additional plot twist) turns out to be a person of color whose girlfriend died as a direct result of the Mollys’ bullying. Save for Pam, who wasn’t there on the night in question, and therefore wasn’t targeted by the murderer in 1987.
That the killer chooses to dress in a quintessential 80s douchebag mask (one that’s kind of reminiscent of a Donald Trump face) is also telling of “the other” during that decade trying especially hard to fit in with the rest of the white mold held up as an “exemplar” of “how to be.” Not to mention how telling it is that Marisa and Heather so gladly go along with emulating Ringwald because that’s what the white leader of their clique wants to do.
What’s more, the fact that the killer was constantly bullied and ostracized himself heightens the message that things weren’t really “better” “back in the day.” They were simply more convenient for the white majority that didn’t have to “watch itself” as much as it does now (that it’s becoming a minority).
