People love a good horror movie.
They love to sit in a movie and see other people go through a scary experience. Of course if they actually were in the situation themselves, it wouldn't be so fun. Yet because it's someone else going through it, or more accurately pretending to go through it, people can sit and enjoy what would normally be a horrific experience. They can watch psychotic killers attack for the most part innocent victims and see them die in all sorts of ways. Some of them are perfectly realistic and others are strange and make no sense. But people still watch and enjoy them. Although one of the problems with this fact is that at a certain point it becomes boring.
Despite the brutality and destruction on display, people can learn to expect it and even predict when it's going to happen. If this ends up turning out the way they think, it's not as scary. They never manage to reach the same level of fear that they used to. So people creating them have to come up with new and creative ways of killing people. Just to keep the whole feeling of fear and excitement going. Even that fact can become something of a problem though. There's only so many ways you can kill someone before it no longer becomes shocking. All you can really do in such a situation is look inside and figure out the reasons why someone is doing it. To make that the scary part of the horror movie. The more emotional the reason the killer is doing it, the more impact it has when you realize what their reasons are.
In many ways, the way in which a horror movie scares you is in how much it reflects who you are and the way you feel. Which itself gets to the point that the only thing to do is to acknowledge that reality. To show people who know about horror movies what might happen to them in the situations they're in. So that the part which is scary isn't so much that there's a killer coming after you, but the creative and interesting ways you use the knowledge of such things to escape from the terrible situation the characters are in. Because the final girl in the horror movie is in fact you, but at the same time it's not you.
Totally Killer is in a lot of ways about how the idea of a horror movie has evolved. Jamie Hughes, as played brilliantly by Kiernan Shipka, knows all about the classic ideas of what a horror movie is and the things she's about to go through. But many of the people around her when she's thrown back into the 1980s haven't had the experience. They don't know what she knows about horror movies. Which means they won't go along with who she is and what she thinks is the best way to do things. So in part it's a celebration of horror movies while also being something of a commentary on them.
But it doesn't necessarily fall into the problem of cynicism about horror movies which so many have these days.
It's a fascinating experience and you should take the time to explore the evolution of horror movies by checking out Totally Killer when you can.
You can watch Totally Killer on Amazon.