Viewers going into the disastrous horror thrillerPsycho Killer blind when it hits streaming might almost mistake it for an unearthed film from the 1990s or early 2000s. After all, that was when stories like this one, about a highway cop crossing jurisdictional lines to pursue the prolific serial killer who murdered her husband, were more common multiplex fare.
Some ofPsycho Killer’s credits also throw back to the turn of the millennium: Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker wrote David Fincher’sSeven andSleepy Hollow, while first-time director Gavin Polone was a producer in that era. (He worked on a separate Fincher thriller, 2002’sPanic Room.)Psycho Killereven includes scenes that involve classified ads and physically signing into a motel guestbook, and though the phones and computers look relatively contemporary, a reference to the anniversary of a major news event suggests that the story takes place somewhere around 2007.
The mind drifts toward locatingPsycho Killer in time because the film so clearly evokes multiple transition points for American horror. Early proto-slasher movies likePsychoandThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre were purportedlyinspired by real-life serial killers like Ed Gein, before post-Halloween slashers likeNightmare on Elm Street delved into the supernatural. Then, during the 1990s, serial killer movies largely supplanted the slashers of the ’80s as the cinema’s premier outlet for grisly violence and scares.That transition was almost ridiculously tidy: In 1991, the year of the final mainlineNightmare on Elm Street movie and a flopChild’s Play entry,The Silence of the Lambs(which also has someEd Gein elements!) became one of the year’s biggest hits, and eventually won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A few years later,Sevenbecame one of the biggest horror hits of the decade. WhenScream arrived in 1996 and revived slashers, it did so using more of a ’90s-style serial-killer framework than its ’80s predecessors had.
One major difference between the slasher and serial killer subgenres is that serial killer movies have a more prominent presence of law enforcement and news media. A stray cop might get impaled in aHalloweenorFriday the 13th movie, but those classic slashers rarely feature reporters updating the outside world on the strange case of Jason Voorhees, or FBI agents determined to send Freddy Krueger back to hell. Michael Myers might make the evening news (that certainly figures into David Gordon Green’s recentlegacysequels), but his movies are never really about cops on his trail or aGale Weathers type cracking a case. Part of what makes these supernatural or borderline-supernatural killers scary is the sense that the often-adolescent protagonists they’re preying on are hopelessly alone in their battle against unknowable evil.
That line between procedural serial killer stories and more instinctive slasher movies should makePsycho Killer a fascinating hybrid befitting its title. While Jane Archer (Barbarian andCold Storagestar Georgina Campbell) is both an adult and a cop — two things that push this movie toward the “serial killer” column — she’s vengefully pursuing a slasher whose unmistakably ornate on-screen kills in desolate settings would look out of place in urban serial-killer thrillers likeCopycat (1995) orTaking Lives (2004), which tend to be less upfront about their salaciousness.Further upping his slasher-movie cred, the Satanic Slasher (James Preston Rogers) wears a gas mask that recalls the killer fromMy Bloody Valentine, and at one point, he takes an axe to a miniature orgy, like any good ’80ssex-hating slasher. There’s also a scene where he uses a crude metal contraption like a straw to drink a priest’s blood. It’s the kind of craziness Walker and director David Fincher largely kept off-screen and shrouded in shadows inSeven, because actually seeing it in action is so reminiscent of a goofy Jason Voorhees movie.
Yet this seems to be the material that excites Polone as a director — or that maybe just seems like a necessary marketing hook, now that gnarlier horror, as seen in the gore ofThe Monkey orWeapons, is back in vogue. Whatever the reason, the slaughter scenes are staged with far greater care than the movie’s less absurd (but still not more believable) human interactions. Early on, there’s a quiet, emotional moment where Jane explains to her father that she must pursue the killer rather than taking time to grieve her husband. Polone edits the conversation together as an antsy mess, cutting senselessly between multiple angles and blocking the characters awkwardly, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to tell what the audience is supposed to be focusing their eyes on.
That approach doesn’t capture any nuance of Campbell’s performance, and it doesn’t evoke any particular mood or atmosphere. When the film returns to the killer, glints of his sunglasses and bits of stringy hair visible from the shadows, Polone seems far more confident about what he’s showing us and why.
Psycho Killer is indeed about a character from a serial killer/cop movie chasing a character from a slasher movie. That genre-bending worked wonders for Oz Perkins’Longlegs, which also steered a ’90s serial killer story toward something eerier and more uncanny. But as Jane tails the Satanic Slasheron a cross-country journey and the two storylines converge, they grow increasingly incompatible. Like some other serial-killer villains — but even more like a comic-book antagonist —Psycho Killer’s mad slasher has an absurdly ambitious plan to prove his fealty to evil.This gives Walker’s screenplay (or perhaps a bastardized version of it) the opportunity to include a hilarious, unnecessary dose of old-school Satanic panic. When Jane straight-facedly blames a Satanic rock band for partially inspiring the killer, the natural response would be to ask why a highway-patrol officer suddenly fancies herself a psychologist. It’s an even weirder detour when the movie’s ending appears to twist the killer’s identity without the merest hit of explanation — maybe one of the most brazen that-just-raises-further-questions finales of all time.
In spite of a few suspenseful sequences,Psycho Killercollapses into a mishmash of terrible, misguided ideas long before its bafflingly nonsensical ending. But Polone’s film does illustrate just how different serial killer movies and slashers can be, regardless of their shared DNA. The Satanic Slasher looks and acts like he should be staggering from campground to suburban enclave to college campus, carving up unsuspecting young people. Expanding his canvas to half the country doesn’t automatically make him a believable real-world obsessive, and giving him a supposedly level-headed nemesis doesn’t give the movie any additional insight into the evil that real people can do.Is the audience supposed to be scared of his random-strike disregard for human life, or his single-minded adherence to a devilish master plan? It’s hard to sell both at once, no matter how related they might seem. At the same time,Psycho Killershows some kinship between the psychos and the killers: Both types of movies can be insultingly, irretrievably stupid.
Psycho Killer is in theaters now.
