Nahnatchka Khan’s Totally Killer opens on what reads as a concession to David Gordon Green’s Halloween: a slobberknocker between a masked maniac and a pseudo-final girl. He’s the Sweet Sixteen Killer, responsible for murdering three high school girls in 1987; she’s Pam, the one the killer passed over, and who’s looked over her shoulder ever since.
On Halloween 2023, he reemerges and breaks into her house, apparently intent on tying up loose ends, but she’s got his number: “I’ve been worried about being murdered since I was 16,” she shouts. “You thought I wouldn’t be prepared?”
The film’s structure loops back and forth from present to past, and casts two actresses as Pam at both stages of her life. Teen Pam is played by Olivia Holt. Adult Pam is played by Julie Bowen, calcified in pop consciousness as Claire Dunphy, a contemporary paragon of unapologetic straitlaced motherhood, through the series run of ABC’s Modern Family. Bowen’s part amounts to a cameo, but that indelible association with Claire makes her casting a stroke of brilliance; there’s no extant sitcom character better suited to go toe to toe with a slasher.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead for Totally Killer, which is now available on Prime Video.)
Totally Killer requires Pam to die to kick off the plot. Her daughter, Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), is ridden with grief and stricken by guilt; in their last exchange before Pam meets her end, Jamie, tired of living in the shadow of Pam’s neuroses, blows her off. “I sort of wish you guys would just get over it,” Jamie says in that trademarked teenage drawl where contempt collides with boredom. Fair point, in her defense. Parents do have a way of projecting their hang ups on their kids. Besides: Jamie isn’t a fortune teller. But such assurances mean little for a kid who’s just lost her mom in an act of barbaric violence.
Then Amelia (Kelcey Mawema), Jamie’s friend, tries her hand at perfecting time travel for the school science fair, and Jamie leaps at the chance to put wrong things right. Apart from being a genius, and the child of a genius, Amelia makes a nice foil for Jamie; she has a healthy relationship with her mother. All Jamie cares about is zapping back to 1987, where she meets Teen Pam and, after a rocky start, convinces her old school mom to help her stop the Sweet Sixteen Killer in the past—thus saving Pam in the present.
If only Jamie knew. Yes, Pam requires saving; it turns out that it’s very hard to keep someone from killing you when they want it enough. But what makes Pam stand out as a final girl variant, and what makes Bowen such a great choice for the role, is her stealth grit. Like Claire in Modern Family, Pam is a bundle of exposed nerves in suburban America, where uptight fussing is seen as an expectation as well as a virtue. Every piece of armor she saddles Jamie with—keychain pepper spray, rape alarm, a psychic crystal, half a lifetime of self defense classes—is integral to her love language.
“We’re just trying to keep you safe,” Pam tells Jamie. Imagining Bowen performing the same exchange with either Ariel Winter or Sarah Hyland, her Modern Family co-stars, comes easily. Claire looks out for her kids, as all good parents do, and as all kids do, hers tend to bristle against her overbearing attempts at keeping them safe. Jamie’s dynamic with Pam isn’t much different, except that Pam keeps a stash of weapons all over her house: a pistol concealed in a bookshelf’s hidden compartment, Mace strapped to the bottom of a couch’s frame. She knows how to fight, too. With or without weapons, she beats the tar out of the Sweet Sixteen Killer for a few solid minutes before Khan takes the movie onward to its next chapter, with Pam left dead in her entryway.
Watching this life-or-death battle unfold, even knowing full well its foregone conclusion, offers a unique sort of satisfaction, couched both in slasher cinema as well as Bowen’s inescapable relationship to Claire Dunphy. It’s not every day that a female character in Pam’s position gets to dish out as much professional-grade punishment to a murder-happy maniac as she does. Far more typical are desperate struggles where the victim throws haymakers and random objects, a frantic effort at buying enough time for a proper head start before they flee; the standard, of course, is domination, where the killer overpowers their helpless corpse-to-be to such a nearly black comical extent.
Totally Killer necessarily bumps Pam off, because otherwise there’d be no movie, but gives her levels of respect and freedom most characters in her position aren’t afforded. For every Sydney Prescott, there’s Allie, the star casualty from Terrifier 2’s nigh-unspeakable “bedroom scene;” Tatum, given a lift in the original Scream; Kitty, subjected to Lucio Fulci’s favorite means of disposal in The New York Ripper’s infamous eye-slashing sequence. Characters like these are lambs led to excruciating slaughter. That’s part of the fun of slashers, of course; we don’t pay the price of admission for these movies not to watch people die horrible deaths. But every now and again it’s refreshing when a film bucks that genre convention, something Totally Killer achieves through its script and its casting. Another actress could have played Pam. That Bowen’s the one who does adds a little something special to the scene’s progression.
Claire Dunphy is athletic; she has a resting heart rate of 48. She’s gritty; she accepts a job working with her dad at his closets company in Modern Family’s later seasons, which means taking misogynist guff from his predominantly male chauvinist employees without flinching. She’s also impossible to scare, and in fact likes the challenge of a good scare, something her husband takes to heart with a nearly year-long operation that pays off on Halloween. His brilliant “woman in the window” horror movie prank works. It works too well. Claire proclaims “game on.” She isn’t deterred; she loves this stuff. That doesn’t necessarily mean she’d love trading blows with an actual psycho in a mask, but it does mean she’d be ready enough to give it a try.
Totally Killer has plenty of attributes to recommend it; like recent teen slashers, such as Freaky or The Final Girls, to which Khan’s film has already been somewhat unfairly compared, heart is almost as much the goal as horror itself. But Bowen, brief as her appearance is, adds an extra-special something to what’s otherwise a thankless role. Pam’s job in the film is to die. Bowen’s job is to make that death meaningful. Carrying her experience playing Claire Dunphy into her performance as Pam, Bowen strikes a memorable chord in Totally Killer; she totally kicks ass.
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