Totally Killer marks the return of final girl horror

Blumhouse Television and Amazon Studios Totally Killer steers the return of final girl horror with direction from Don’t Trust The B in Apartment 23 creator Nahnatchka Khan and screenplay by David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D’Angelo. The film is about the shocking murder of three teens 35 years ago by a masked killer. In the present day, the killer returns on Halloween to claim a fourth victim.

The time-travel horror film stars Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Kiernan Shipka as a high school junior named Jamie Hughes who ignores warnings from her mother (played by Modern Family and Hubie Halloween Julie Bowen). As a result, she comes face-to-face with the killer and travels to October 27, 1987. While navigating the culture of the late 1980s, Jamie teams up with her teen mom (Olivia Holt) and her friends to take down the killer before Jamie gets stuck in the past.

The film opens exactly like the trailer of Shipka and Bowen playing mother-daughter, and the first nine minutes draw into the Laurie Strode and Michael Myers face-off moment. The aftermath of the opening deals with Jamie traveling back to the day of the first murder. This time-travel slasher sets itself up by drawing similar connections from Halloween meets Scream but feels more influenced by Halloween, with the humor drawing to the two-season sitcom mentioned earlier.

The Blumhouse and Amazon Studios final girl horror pokes fun at Back to the Future, the whole time-travel-lore, and making fun of the entire slasher genre that was first see from the trailer. The familiar storytelling that is easily on-the-nose in the first act leading up to the following minutes of the second act before steering us to the final and third act when Shipka character Jamie delivers a Laurie Strode performance facing against a maskless Michael Myers-ish killer.