‘Psycho Killer’ Is One of the Best Films of 2026 — So Why Did Everyone Hate It?

The "Correct Opinion" column returns to heap praise on Andrew Kevin Walker and Gavin Polone's terrifying, audacious, and unjustly maligned horror film from earlier this year.

Reader, you have been lied to! Film history is littered with unfairly maligned classics, whether critics were too eager to review the making of rather than the finished product, or they suffered from underwhelming ad campaigns or general disinterest. Let’s revise our takes on some of these films from wrongheaded to the correct opinion.

Ordinarily in this column, I defend underrated or forgotten films that I’ve had the chance to sit with for years — movies like “The Two Jakes,” “The Canyons,” or “Daisy Miller,” that have given me plenty of time to sit with my original contrarian assessment and test it against other opinions and analyses. This month, however, I’d like to defend and celebrate a maligned film that has had less than a year to worm its way into my personal pantheon: the one-of-a-kind slasher flick “Psycho Killer.”

“Psycho Killer” opened in theaters in February, and if you don’t remember it you’re not alone — 20th Century unceremoniously dumped it with the kind of minimal ad spend that indicates an almost awe-inspiring lack of confidence. (I know 20th Century was only distributing the film, which was financed independently by New Regency, but still…) 20th Century didn’t release the movie, it abandoned it. Audiences and critics alike could smell the fear, and got their knives out.

The execs at 20th Century probably felt justified when “Psycho Killer” opened without even cracking the top ten at the box office and got terrible reviews (it sat comfortably at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes for a few days, until a few insightful dissenters drove the rating up to 9%). But in both cases I’d argue it was a self-fulfilling prophecy; the movie was never going to do anything in terms of grosses if audiences weren’t made aware of its existence, and most critics lazily made the assumption that if the studio was dumping it, the movie must not be good.

This way of thinking is not uncommon, and it’s not limited to film criticism. It’s a little like the people you run into on jury duty who think that surely the cops wouldn’t have arrested the defendant if there wasn’t ample justification for doing so. The animosity toward “Psycho Killer,” though, reaches new heights of prejudice and laziness; in most of the reviews, the critics don’t seem to be describing the movie that was made as much as the one they expected based on the bad vibes put out by the studio. One gets the sense that some of the reviews were half-written before the writers even saw the movie.

The problem is that even those who did see it failed to judge it on its own terms, according to which it’s a highly successful and accomplished piece of filmmaking. For those (roughly eight billion or so) of you who didn’t see the movie, it’s essentially a story on two parallel tracks that follows the monster of the title (a serial killer known as the “Satanic Slasher”) and a cop who becomes obsessed with catching him after he murders her husband. As the Satanic Slasher gruesomely hacks his way across the country with the cop in pursuit, his backstory and intentions are parceled out to the viewer piece by piece, until the movie arrives at a completely unpredictable conclusion.

Along the way, there are several compelling self-contained set pieces and digressions, and a fair degree of genre-hopping. At its core, the film is a slasher movie, and the cop (Georgina Campbell) is the final girl. But it’s also a road movie, and a mystery along the lines of something like “Copycat” or “Murder by Numbers.” The screenplay is by Andrew Kevin Walker, whose “Se7en” practically invented the modern day serial killer movie. “Psycho Killer” is, in its way, just as innovative and surprising, but for whatever reason this time Walker left the audience in the dust.

I think one of the movie’s greatest strengths, its audacious tone-switching and blending of disparate influences, is also what makes it tough for unimaginative viewer to get behind. Many of the criticisms of the film revolve around its implausibilities, particularly as far as the title character is concerned — a hulking, almost mythic character with a terrifying voice who often walks around wearing what appears to be gas mask, he somehow manages to keep eluding authorities even though he’s about as inconspicuous as a grizzly bear in a beauty salon.

I certainly won’t argue that “Psycho Killer” is a realistic movie, but I will argue that complaining about a lack of realism in this movie is like complaining about the lack of musical numbers in “Resident Evil.” It’s completely irrelevant to the terms Walker establishes. The Satanic Slasher is no more or less realistic than Michael Myers, or Jason, or any of the other slashers whose movies Walker is riffing on here; for that matter, nothing happens in this movie that’s any less plausible than Kevin Spacey’s serial killer in “Se7en” orchestrating the absurdly complex scheme that accomplishes everything he intends without a hitch.

Because there are those other genres operating alongside the slasher tropes, however, there seems to be some kind of misguided expectation of naturalism in the film — people want it to play by the rules, but Walker’s complete disregard for the rules is a source of the film’s greatness. Structurally, the movie is as air-tight (it clocks in at under 90 minutes and doesn’t have a wasted frame) as it is avant-garde, deftly shifting point of view and directing the audience away from details hiding in plain sight (often in the sound design) that point the way toward the batshit-crazy resolution without ever letting the viewer get even a few minutes ahead of the story.

There’s a relentless propulsion to the narrative, yet it also constantly makes time for isolated set pieces that alternate between the terrifying and the hilarious (and, in the case of a side trip the slasher takes to a house of satan worshippers led by Malcolm McDowell, both at the same time). The tone is established right from the opening, when the cop sees her husband killed on a lonely road by the slasher; it’s a carefully constructed sequence of steadily increasing unease that culminates in a moment if shocking, horrifying violence, and there are several similar moments to come.

From that opening scene on, the Satanic Slasher is scary in the way that Michael Myers was in John Carpenter’s original “Halloween,” and part of it has to do with director Gavin Polone‘s gift for juxtaposing borderline supernatural horror with the quotidian in the way that Carpenter did. Polone’s a producer and former manager making his directorial debut with “Psycho Killer,” and his command of rhythm and framing is impressive — I’m not sure what led him to take this on as a director (though he was first attached to it over 15 years ago, so obviously it’s something he was seriously committed to), but he’s a natural born filmmaker whose attention to detail and unconventional eye are rare and admirable.

Polone was first announced as the movie’s director in trade articles somewhere around 2010, and the script had been circulating for at least a few years before that. The movie went through many incarnations over the years — at one point Limp Bizkit frontman and “The Fanatic” director Fred Durst was attached to helm, and at another Eli Roth was going to produce — but what seems to have finally gotten it across the finish line was the involvement of producer Roy Lee.

Lee has been around for decades, but in the last few years he’s really become the most reliable producer in Hollywood when it comes to smart, inventive horror films. His filmography includes more flat-out masterpieces per year than just about anybody else — in the last five years his titles include “Late Night With the Devil,” “Strange Darling,” “Companion,” “Barbarian,” Weapons,” “Resident Evil,” “Hokum,” and several more flat-out bangers.

“Psycho Killer” feels right at home alongside these films, but where Zach Creggar and some of Lee’s other collaborators received critical accolades (and in many cases commercial success) for their risks, “Psycho Killer” was punished for thinking outside the box. It, Lee, Polone, and Walker deserved better. But that’s just my opinion.

“Psycho Killer” is currently streaming on Hulu.