Buffy Star’s Obscure Thriller You Might Be the Killer Streaming Free

Novelist Sam Sykes (the Aeons Gate series) and Chuck Wendig (Blackbirds, Star Wars: Aftermath) used X in 2017 to co-write an improvised horror satire. The result was a tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of slasher movies concerning Sam Sykes’ unnamed character taking a new job as a camp counselor while a massacre unfolds in the woods. The story went viral quickly. Wendig has since abandoned X and locked his account, so readers can no longer view the original thread outside of unofficial screenshot archives.

Wendig reported the next year that he and Sykes reached a deal with Thomas Vitale (Slasher, Pandora). Vitale co-wrote and co-produced a film adaptation with Brett Simmons from Pandora directing. The 2018 movie You Might Be the Killer starred Fran Kranz (The Cabin in the Woods) and Alyson Hannigan (How I Met Your Mother, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), along with a cameo by Keith David.

You Might Be the Killer debuted at Fantastic Fest in Texas in 2018. It played the international festival circuit before releasing on Shudder. The COVID-19 pandemic later relegated many pre-2020 releases to relative obscurity, but the film is currently available to stream for free on Tubi.

How I spent my last summer vacation

You Might Be the Killer opens with Sam (Kranz) covered in blood and running for his life. He finds a hiding place, turns on his phone, and calls his friend Chuck (Hannigan), who works a shift at an indie bookstore.

Sam works as the lead counselor at Camp Clear Vista in the middle of nowhere. He tells Chuck that a murderer is loose in the camp and many of the other counselors are dead. Sam suffers from memory gaps, so he pieces the story together while talking to Chuck.

The film tells an old-school slasher story out of order through Sam’s fragmented recollections of Camp Clear Vista. A masked killer eliminates most of the staff, but Sam does not understand why he is covered in blood or why the killer is present. He organizes his personal timeline by body count, treating each counselor’s death as a fixed point in the night.

You Might Be the Killer acts as two movies at once. The murders at Camp Clear Vista follow a straightforward slasher formula in the style of early Friday the 13th or the first two Sleepaway Camps.

Chuck reacts to the events from a safe distance. Hannigan plays Chuck as weary from genre fiction and unfazed even when her friend reports mortal peril. She serves as an audience surrogate similar to Randy Meeks in Scream.

The movie functions as a horror project built for horror fans, featuring decapitations, dismemberments, and practical effects.

You Might Be the Killer is streaming now on Tubi.

Source: Polygon