Totally Killer’s Judd Overton Details Cinematography Challenges in Film’s Climactic Third Act

The spooky movie season has a new face of fear. Prime Video’s Totally Killer introduces fans to the Sweet 16 Killer, a mask-clad, knife-wielding murderer who targets a group of four teenage girls around Halloween in 1987, killing three of them over three days in October. The murders were never solved, and the Sweet 16 Killer went dormant for the next four decades. Flash forward to 2023, and that sinister smile returns, targeting the now-grown fourth girl, Pam Hughes (Julie Bowen). Pam’s daughter, Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), gets tangled in some time travel shenanigans that brings her back to the original Sweet 16 Killer murders in 1987.

Totally Killer’s Judd Overton Details Cinematography Challenges

Speaking to ComicBook.com, Totally Killer cinematographer Judd Overton provided some insight into what horror films of yesteryear influenced this new comedy slasher’s style.

“We definitely looked at [Friday the 13th] and Halloween, I think the original Halloween was a big reference,” Overton said. “In fact, there’s a couple of frames that we pretty highly resembled or almost duplicated. I think the vibe of those 1980s films was exactly what we were going for, something that we could easily slot back into because we bounced around from 2023 back to ’87. We wanted to make it really easy for the audience to kind of go on that journey and know which time space that we’re in.”

As cinematographer, Overton had an especially unique experience on Totally Killer compared to his other projects. Beyond the obvious time period switches, Overton was tasked with shooting the film’s crucial, climactic third act sequence on a gravitron.

“I’d never seen anything like it. When I got that on the script, I was like, ‘This is going to be incredible,’” Overton said. “You could already tell that that was going to be a set piece that was going to stand out and a really great way to end the film. The logistics on that were pretty extreme. We went through every iteration. It’s a small space on these gravitons.”

The challenges of transforming an actual gravitron into a film set led to Overton and company questioning if there were alternative options, but budgetary constraints made it clear that they had to take the road less traveled.

“Could we build on a stage and actually have flyaway walls and have all of our rigging points in our lighting dialed in? But that just wasn’t in our budget, so we had to go with a real gravitron,” Overton continued. “Then we had to kind of do as little as we possibly could because it’s actually a pretty technical piece of equipment. Safety is very important to those guys and they get engineers to survey it after every time it’s set up.”

When it came time to shoot, Overton got creative.

“We weren’t really able to change it in any ways, but we were able to remove one of the pieces. We couldn’t obviously shoot with it moving that wouldn’t work with the cameras,” Overton explained. “There’s only one place that you can stand, which is in the middle, and we didn’t want to shoot the whole sequence from there. That center console is actually really tiny. It’s only big enough for the person who’s running the machine to fit in there. We had to shoot a bit static. 

“We basically created a chase with our lighting. We used LED lighting again. We had to make it look like period lighting. So we got some neon strip, some sort of rubber covers that covered our LED lights and made it look like as if it was a period lighting device. We found some little cracks between the beds so we could throw some light through there. That kind of made it just really feel like it was spinning.”

Totally Killer is currently streaming on Prime Video and boasts a certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.