As has oft been noted, one of the great pleasures of attending film festivals, getting early looks at films which have yet to (or in some cases, never really do) reach a wide audience, is being caught by surprise by material of which you knew little or nothing beforehand. This is particularly the case when it’s a mystery movie, one of which Sheffield’s Celluloid Screams makes a point of including in its line-up every year. This year, around the stroke of twelve on the Saturday night, it was revealed that their 2018 mystery movie was You Might Be The Killer, a film of which I must confess to having been entirely ignorant beforehand. However, as soon as the poster art below was projected onto the Showroom Cinema screen, a slew of questions and preconceptions arose in my mind. So there’s Alyson Hannigan and Fran Kranz, both famous for their work with Joss Whedon; might this hint to the tone of what we’re about to see? There’s a vintage VHS vibe, so it seems fair to assume something a bit retro, yes? And it certainly seems a bit slasher-ish right away, which immediately makes Kranz’s presence in some ways a bit of a surprise; after all, he was in The Cabin In The Woods, specifically designed to be the last word on deconstructionist slasher/cabin horror, so where is there left to go from there?
Well, I doubt anyone would be so generous as to suggest writer-director Brett Simmons’ film breaks too much new ground in mining the codes and conventions of slashers for fresh surprises. Even so, if you’re very well-acquainted with said codes and conventions, and enjoy seeing them played with first and foremost for laughs, then there’s no reason that You Might Be The Killer shouldn’t show you a good time. It’s a particularly good choice to slap on in the midnight hour, as it’s breezily paced, packs in plenty of giggles, and has a fun, relatively unique structure; which, as I’ve since learned, owes to it being modelled on a Twitter thread. Yeah, that might seem an odd basis for a feature film, but it’s not exactly without precedent; @ShitMyDadSays became a sitcom, after all.
When we met Sam (Kranz), he seems to be having a very bad night. He’s drenched in blood, gasping for breath, hiding in fear for his life, and in his hour of need he calls his best friend, comic book store owner and occult scholar Chuck (Hannigan, playing a role one can’t help but suspect was originally written for a man, not that the character’s gender has any bearing on proceedings). It transpires that Sam is out in a super-remote stretch of woodland where he’s setting up a summer camp on old family property, yet under circumstances he can’t quite recall off-hand, a masked madman armed with a huge, weird-looking machete showed up, and hacked up all the other camp counsellors. However, as Chuck talks Sam through it all, getting him to mentally retrace his steps and attempting to fill in the blank spots, the two friends reach what is for them a somewhat startling conclusion, although for the audience it’s not quite so hard to fathom given the film’s title: the man behind the mask is none other than Sam himself, under the influence of some sort of supernatural force beyond his comprehension.
It’s curious how a film which is ostensibly so heavily modelled on the slasher movies of the early 80s, both in terms of narrative set-up and its Grindhouse-esque grainy battered print affectations, winds up instead being far more evocative of the late 90s (for one, the Alyson Hannigan on the poster seems to have been lifted directly from her Buffy years; she doesn’t look shit like that in this film, as the still at the top of the page will confirm). It was, after all, Scream and its imitators which sent the genre in a media student-friendly direction, going to pains to directly address the genre tropes, sometimes in an attempt to subvert them, but more often than not simply to take the piss, hence – to my mind, at least – there’s an almost unbearable smugness about most of the slashers made at that time. Accusations could certainly be made of You Might Be The Killer falling into much the same trap, as it too is largely centred on its characters acknowledging that they are living through a slasher movie, and trying to work their knowledge of the genre to their practical advantage. I gather this approach was a bit divisive among the Celluloid Screams crowd, with many feeling that it was a tired approach and that the gags didn’t land.
For myself, though, I really quite enjoyed You Might Be The Killer. It’s not a film I imagine I’ll be in any particular rush to see again, and I have my doubts about how well it will linger in the memory in the long run, but I had plenty of fun watching it (even though I might have dozed off for a few minutes here and there in the final act… look, it was late and it had been a long day, alright?) And if nothing else, this film demonstrates that, if you’re going to centre an entire 90-odd minute narrative around a phone conversation, you’d better have strong actors on both ends of the line. Kranz and Hannigan clearly fit the bill there, and are obviously helped by their history in similar material which this film’s intended audience are already well acquainted with. Their charm and screen presence goes a long way to help sell what might otherwise have seemed that bit too lightweight a comedy horror.
You Might Be The Killer just screened at Sheffield’s Celluloid Screams; our thanks to all at the festival.