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This 2018 Meta Slasher Started as a Twitter Joke & Became a Movie Starring Buffy & Dollhouse Faves
"Whenever we had a chance to splatter, we splattered," director Brett Simmons tells SYFY WIRE.
The creators behind meta slasher flick You Might Be the Killer took a fun social media gag and turned it into a wild, blood-soaked comedy-horror cult hit. "I’m really proud of the gore," director Brett Simmons told SYFY WIRE. "Whenever we had a chance to splatter, we splattered."
Many viewers of slasher movies can picture themselves as the victim making a heroic escape, but have you ever stopped to think that you might be the killer? That's the concept behind the 2018 movie, which is streaming now on SYFY. When a group of camp counselors go to the backwoods of Louisiana to prepare for summer, things take a turn for the worse as a killer is on the loose. The premise sets the movie up to play off all our favorite tropes, seen in flicks like the Friday the 13th franchise, which is why the film was originally going to be given a more meta title, “Dead Counselors.”
We caught up with You Might Be the Killer director, co-writer and co-producer Simmons (director of 2013's The Monkey’s Paw), and co-writer and co-producer Thomas P. Vitale (who's also an executive producer of the horror series Slasher) to discuss the creation of the movie, a must-see for any slasher fan.
At its core, it’s a “slasher movie where the characters are as self-aware as the audience watching it is, while not being a spoof,” Simmons says. The opening scene features the frenetic counselor Sam (Fran Kranz) calling his horror fan friend Chuck (Alyson Hannigan), hoping to get help escaping a killer stalking the campgrounds. Chuck offers Sam advice, but eventually speculates Sam might be the killer. This scene’s dialogue and the movie’s origin came directly from a Twitter (now X) thread.
How You Might Be the Killer started as a Twitter gag
Writer Sam Sykes (not to be confused with Sam from the movie) was going camping and jokingly tweeted at another writer, Chuck Wendig (clearly there are a lot of Easter Eggs with characters’ names in the film), playing the role of someone in a horror movie.
As Vitale described the Twitter conversation to us, “Sam tweeted, ‘It was going super well, but there's a crazy serial killer roaming the grounds right now.’ Chuck says, ‘Oh... that sometimes happens.’ Now suddenly, you're in this meta world already with these tweets. Sam said, ‘You got any advice? They're all dead, like, almost everyone.’ Chuck comes back with, ‘I hate to ask this but are you sure YOU are not the killer?’”
Vitale then pitched this concept as a film, and tells us this eventually became “the first time a Twitter conversation has ever been optioned and turned into a movie.” The movie doesn’t follow a linear format because the creators wanted the Twitter conversation to take place not at the beginning of the movie, but in the middle of the plot.
“Legend of the Woodcutter”: Designing the mask in You Might Be the Killer
When asked what the most important part of making this meta slasher movie was, Vitale and Simmons agreed: it’s the mask. The design team created a wood carved mask that’s unique to anything we’ve seen before. That’s because rather than make a mask with a “big scary face,” they decided “simpler is always going to be scarier.” They crafted this “Legend of the Woodcutter” to tie with the mask and the killer’s weapon, which was a “machete fused with the jawbones of a gator.”
Iconic design can certainly hook you in a slasher, but according to Vitale, “The key to getting the tone of a horror comedy to work is to make sure that the characters play it like they’re really in the situation.” Playing it straight took stellar performances from stars Hannigan (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Kranz (The Cabin in the Woods).
According to Simmons, Kranz was at first hesitant to play the role, worried it would be a spoof. Kranz and Hannigan had so much chemistry playing best friends, but according to Simmons, they never acted in the same room. Hannigan only had two days to film all her scenes, giving them little time to do so, which is also impressive because she has nonstop lines.
It takes a lot to sharpen a horror comedy, including finding the perfect music and gore. Simmons’ wife, Rebecca Simmons, is a musician, so he gave her the difficult task of creating a theme song for the specific vibe they were going for. When she came back with it, Simmons was stoked.
At the premiere, “the audience completely got what we were trying to make and sent everybody out of the theater with the right mindset," he said, adding that he still uses the theme song when kids come trick-or-treating for Halloween.
When asked about his favorite scene, Simmons joked, “I guess it's sick to say that I could rewatch the head getting cut in half from the refrigerator over and over again, but I really could.” We’re right there with you. It’s awesome. And there's plenty of blood. It’s impressive when you think about shooting scenes with sticky sugar blood in a bug-infested New Orleans swamp.
“I’m really grateful for that whole process,” Simmons says of the film. “I feel like the movie succeeded out of collaborating so well and sprinting together down the line, so I’m really proud of the movie and again, really grateful.”
You Might Be the Killer is streaming now on SYFY.
