Nahnatchka Khan officially became a player in the horror space after directing Totally Killer. With her genre bending, comedy-horror film she pays tribute to the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s classics including Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Poltergeist, Halloween, and Scream – movies she secretly watched as a teenager.
Khan was particularly amazed by how Halloween managed to be terrifying during daytime scenes, and she cites Wes Craven’s meta-horror classic Scream as groundbreaking for its subversive, intelligent approach that didn’t speak down to the audience.
While Khan loves the genre, her late mother was superstitious and disapproved of it. Khan had to pretend to be watching innocuous films like Beaches when she was really watching horror films at her friends’ homes. Khan says Totally Killer is probably the only project she has worked on that her mom would never see.
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This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
A lot of times people in the horror genre have grown up loving horror movies. It started at an early age, and a lot of their parents kind of showed them movies in that genre. For me, it was completely opposite because my parents, especially my mom, were very superstitious, and did not allow anything remotely having to do with the devil in our house. Forget about the devil, like you couldn’t even have a bird in a cage in the house because she would be like, “That's bad luck.”
No scary movies ever, so the way I would experience that would be to go to my friend's house and watch movies. That's when I first got exposed to all of the classic ‘80s slasher films Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Poltergeist, Halloween, all that stuff. I would have to go over there, then come back and lie. My mom, she would go “What did you watch?” It was like, “Oh, I don't know, I think it was a movie called Beaches.
Definitely the original Halloween, I think is one of the most terrifying movies that I've ever seen.
Something in that movie that I think I hadn't seen before, the way that they were able to have it be scary in the daylight, I thought was really amazing. When Jamie Lee Curtis and her friends are walking home from school, that whole section, and Michael Myers is hiding behind the hedges, then behind the laundry or whatever, and that's a daytime sequence. I think there's something so chilling and so beautiful and so artfully done about that.
I think when you talk about genre mashup, you can't not talk about Scream. The original Scream in ‘95 and subsequent franchise of course, but that original, just was mind blowing in how subversive it was, how intelligent it was, and how it didn't sort of speak down to the audience, but rather assumed the audience knew and came into their movie knowing a lot of things about movies themselves. And I think that really sort of changed the game and for a long time and probably forever, but that was something that I really was like, “Holy, moly, they know what they're doing.”
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