Prime Video’s 106-Minute Sci-Fi Slasher Is Scream Meets Back to the Future

Published Sep 19, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While a blend of Scream and Back to the Future might sound hard to pull off in terms of tone and style, 2023’s Prime Video slasher comedy somehow managed to make this mix work. When Scream was released in 1996, it would have been impossible for critics and fans of the horror genre to predict just how much the Wes Craven movie would go on to shape the genre in the 30 years that followed.

Like 1980’s Friday the 13th before it, Scream was a blend of slasher horror and Agatha Christie-style murder mystery where working out the identity of the killer behind the mask was half the fun of the movie’s story. It is easy to forget this when whodunit plotting has become a staple of modern slasher movies, thanks in large part to the success of the Scream franchise, but there was a time when it was unusual for slashers to hide the identity of their killer.

Not only did the Halloween movies never make a mystery of the fact that Michael Myers was the one doing the killing, but the Nightmare On Elm Street, Child’s Play, Leprechaun, and Candyman movies all featured their instantly recognizable killers front and center. Scream’s meta commentary on slasher tropes is often highlighted as the movie’s biggest contribution to the subgenre, but its whodunit plotting was just as influential, as evidenced by Prime Video’s underrated 2023 time travel slasher comedy Totally Killer.

Totally Killer Mixes Time Travel With A Slasher Story

Effectively blending the premise of the Back to the Future trilogy with the Scream series, 2023’s Totally Killer sees Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s Kiernan Shipka travel back to the ‘80s to undo a massacre that killed all her mom’s friends. As the movie begins, Shipka’s Jamie is warned off going out on Halloween night by her overprotective mother, whose friends were murdered by a masked spree killer 39 years earlier.

When Jamie comes home from a concert, she discovers her mother has been killed by the same murderer, back to finish what they started almost four decades later. Chased by the killer, a grieving Jamie hides in her friend’s experimental time machine and ends up transported back to 1987, where she must identify and stop the killer before they can pull off either of their future massacres.

While this plot might sound bleak and brutal, Totally Killer’s director Nahnatchka Khan is a veteran of the sitcoms Don't Trust the B— in Apartment 23, Fresh Off the Boat, and Fox’s 400-episode animated comedy American Dad, the latter of which was perhaps the best proving ground for Totally Killer’s unique tone. While gruesome and violent, the Prime Video movie is also raunchy, goofy, playful, and surprisingly sweet, taking the character comedy of Hot Tub Time Machine and dropping it into a slasher movie.

Totally Killer’s Success Highlights A Great Slasher Horror Trend

Jamie’s attempts to bond with her icy mother, a popular prom queen who instantly takes a dislike to her, are hilarious but also surprisingly sweet, reversing the pair’s present-day dynamic as Jamie fruitlessly attempts to warn her mother to be safe, while her mother laughs this off as paranoid prudishness. Meanwhile, Jamie’s shocked reactions to ‘80s life, from its weak weed to its open and blatant misogyny, provide even more laughs even as the body count rises.

This combines to turn Totally Killer into the latest in a spate of slasher movies with a unique difference. While Shudder’s small-screen anthology Slasher and the Terrifier movies have both pushed the proverbial boat out in terms of what can be depicted onscreen, making slashers more brutal and bleak than ever before, a rash of slasher movies from the last decade have taken the opposite approach and offered a surprisingly sweet, playful spin on the genre.

Totally Killer is an unexpectedly upbeat, fun blend of slasher horror and character comedy, like the Babysitter movies, the Happy Death Day movies, Freaky, It’s A Wonderful Knife, Heart Eyes, and arguably even 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot. These movies take the character comedy of the Scream movies and amplify it further, spending more time establishing their characters and their relationships and less time revealing in guts and gore.

Totally Killer Stars Two Contemporary Scream Queens

Both approaches have a place in the world of slasher movies, but Totally Killer’s style succeeds in this instance because of how well suited comedy is to time travel stories. From the Back to the Future trilogy to the aforementioned Hot Tub Time Machine, sci-fi comedy has a long history, at least in part because playful, silly movies aren’t as compelled to explain the supposed science behind their time travel.

While hard sci-fi shows like Netflix’s masterpiece Dark or Prime Video’s The Peripheral offer in-universe explanations that aim to counteract time travel's inherent plot complications, not every story in the genre needs to take the trope so seriously. For every movie like Shane Carruth’s Primer or Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, wherein much of the viewer’s enjoyment is derived from just how granular and complex the fictional time travel is, there are movies like Totally Killer or Happy Death Day 2 U, where time travel is an openly silly, convenient plot device.

The movie’s already-strong appeal is bolstered further by casting not one, but two contemporary scream queens in its lead roles. As well as starring in the Valentine’s Day slasher comedy Heart Eyes, Olivia Holt also led 2025’s unconventional zombie movie This Is Not A Test. Shipka, meanwhile, has a long history in the genre thanks to roles in Longlegs, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Flowers in the Attic, and the monster movie The Silence.

Holt and Shipka’s easy chemistry carries the movie, although supporting performances from horror legend Lochlyn Munro, Modern Family’s Julie Bowen, and Scream VI’s Liana Liberato elevate Totally Killer even further. While the marriage of Christie-style whodunit mystery, gory horror, and playful character comedy doesn’t always work out flawlessly, Prime Video’s Totally Killer is a colorful, fun case of Scream’s formula strengthening an inventive time-travel comedy by adding an unexpected horror twist to proceedings.