Netflix’s Time Cut released a new trailer today, which you can watch below! That new trailer has kicked up a fresh round of discourse surrounding whether or not the movie is a ripoff of last year’s Totally Killer. Both films feature a teenager going back in time to save a family member from getting murdered by a serial killer. The long and the short of it is that it’s absolutely asinine to say that Time Cut is a ripoff of Totally Killer. For one, Time Cut was written before Totally Killer. That doesn’t make Totally Killer a ripoff of Time Cut either! Both films follow a similar trajectory of The Final Girls, which was released in 2015. All three films are slashers. And what’s the name of the game when it comes to slasher movies? That they’re incredibly derivative!

Slasher movies have borrowed each other’s homework since the earliest days of horror. Guess what, if you’re copying Halloween or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, you’re doing the right thing. Movies like Scream borrowed from Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. It’s the name of the game. Throwing Back to the Future together with a slasher is a genius idea. At this point time-travel slasher is just a sub-genre. A sub-genre like familial horror movies or whatever else. Time Cut co-writer Michael Kennedy has already made a career of doing this by adding Freaky Friday to slashers with Freaky and It’s A Wonderful Life to slashers with It’s A Wonderful Knife.

Time Cut

Also, just looking at the two (or three if you’re counting The Final Girls) films, they’re going to different time periods. If it was just going to be a straight-up copy, you’d have them both going to the incredibly popular time period of the ’80s. The only thing you can even compare the two with is the mask that the killers wear, which is, unfortunately, pretty similar. Even then, there are only so many scary-looking masks killers can wear that are iconic or even good-looking.

Horror movies at their heart are going to be derivative of one another. Slashers are even more so. Time Cut and Totally Killer might have a similar plot, but at the end of the day, they’re going to be wildly different movies. Different writers, different casts, different sets, different tones, different everything. If you can’t see that, then you haven’t been paying attention to the history of horror movies.

We saw this discourse when Totally Killer released last year and we’ll continue to see it from the usual suspects that don’t know horror movies and how they work. If you think that everything has to be 100% original, needs a plot that hasn’t been done before, you don’t know ball.

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