There was a time in the distant past when good things could occasionally come out of Twitter. Back in 2017, novelists Sam Sykes (the Aeons’ Gate series) and Chuck Wendig (Blackbirds, Star Wars: Aftermath) got on the website currently known as X to co-write an improvised horror satire. The result was a firmly tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of slasher movies, concerning Sykes’ unnamed character’s new job as a camp counselor and an unfolding massacre in the woods. The story quickly went viral. (While the tweets are still up, Wendig has since abandoned X and locked his account, so the original story can no longer be read outside of a handful of unofficial screenshot archives.)
The next year, Wendig reported that he and Sykes had entered into a deal with Thomas Vitale (Slasher, Pandora), who co-wrote and co-produced a movie based on Wendig and Sykes’ viral Twitter story, with Pandora’s Brett Simmons attached as director. The result was 2018’s You Might Be the Killer, a horror/comedy starring Fran Kranz (The Cabin in the Woods) and Alyson Hannigan (How I Met Your Mother, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), with a brief cameo by Keith David.
You Might Be the Killer debuted at 2018’s Fantastic Fest in Texas, then made its way around the international festival circuit before being released directly to streaming via Shudder. As a result, YMBTK was already a little obscure for all but the most devoted horror fans . . . and then COVID hit, which relegated everything from before 2020 to a strange liminal before-time.
In past decades, YMBTK would be the sort of cult favorite that could build a reputation via home video rental and word of mouth. Now it’s floating in the streaming ether alongside a hundred pointless “watchbait” originals, but that also means it’s ready to be rediscovered. You Might Be the Killer is currently available for free on Tubi, ready for your Halloween horror marathon.
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You Might Be the Killer opens on Sam (Kranz) covered in blood and running for his life. He finds a hiding place, turns his phone back on, and frantically calls his friend Chuck (Hannigan), who’s working a shift at her indie bookstore.
Sam is the lead counselor at Camp Clear Vista, conveniently located in the middle of nowhere. All he initially knows to tell Chuck is that there’s a murderer on the loose in the camp and many, maybe all, of the other counselors are dead. Sam has big gaps in his memory, though, and as he talks to Chuck, he slowly puts his story back together.
The result is an old-school slasher movie that’s told out of order, through Sam’s fragmented recollection of the events at Camp Clear Vista. He knows that a masked killer has taken out most of the camp’s staff, but that doesn’t explain why Sam is covered in blood, what he was running from, or why the killer is there in the first place. His personal timeline is organized per body count, with each counselor’s grisly death as a fixed point in the night’s events.
The central joke in You Might Be the Killer is that it’s two movies at once. The murders at Camp Clear Vista are a straightforward slasher-in-the-woods film, deliberately in the spirit of an early Friday the 13th or the first two Sleepaway Camps.
Chuck, on the other hand, gets to react to the whole story from a safe distance. Hannigan plays Chuck as if she’s so brain-fried from genre fiction that she can’t take anything too seriously anymore, even when her friend is calling to tell her that he’s in mortal peril. She’s both the audience and an audience surrogate, like Randy Meeks in Scream, trying to walk her friend through the rules of film survival like horror-movie tech support.
I do wonder how much of You Might Be the Killer would land for someone who isn’t a horror fan. There’s a lot in YMBTK that feels like inside baseball, from Chuck’s evolving approach to Sam’s issues to the way that many of the counselors suddenly freeze up as the killer approaches. It’s a horror movie for people who like horror movies. Its best jokes are punctuated by decapitations, dismemberments, and one of the more spectacular split skulls in the cinema of the 2010s.
With Crystal Lake‘s recent premiere and the accompanying slow rebirth of the “classic,” pre-Scream slasher movie, it feels as if You Might Be the Killer‘s time has come around again. It’s a loving satire of 1980s horror with a few distinctly postmodern twists, and it deserves a second chance at relevance.
You Might Be the Killer is streaming now on Tubi.