A masked killer, a trapped sorority, and one party girl who has to keep drinking to remember the clues. Here’s what to know about Tubi Original new slasher-comedy Buzzkill before the party starts.
Remind MeDefinitely don't split up. Staying sober also feels like it should be somewhere on that list.
Tubi Original Buzzkill has other plans. Premiering September 25 exclusively on Tubi, the new horror-comedy traps a group of sorority sisters with a vengeful masked killer and puts party girl Nora, played by Siena Agudong, in the deeply inconvenient position of potentially being the one person who can identify who's murdering her friends. There's just one problem: the clues are buried inside her tipsy memories, and the drunker she gets, the more she starts remembering.
That's one way to rewrite the slasher rulebook. Instead of giving its heroine perfect instincts and a conveniently clear head, Buzzkill builds its horror-comedy around a survivor whose best chance of finding the killer also makes getting through the night considerably more complicated. The chaos arrives as part of the fall Original lineup inside Terror on Tubi, Tubi's year-round horror destination where Nora is about to join a whole lot of people having very bad nights.
Slasher history has taught Final Girls to keep their heads clear while everyone around them makes increasingly questionable decisions. Nora is starting from a slightly different place.
What makes that setup especially fun isn't simply watching her drink her way toward an answer; it's the contradiction built into every new clue. Nora may be getting closer to understanding what happened, but she's hardly becoming a more reliable detective, or a more coordinated target, in the process. Suddenly, solving the mystery and surviving it are working against each other. It's exactly the kind of slasher-rule chaos that makes our Final Girl hall of fame so much fun to revisit, except Nora apparently skipped several chapters of the survival handbook.
Director Jem Garrard was drawn to exactly that imperfection. Nora isn't being positioned as the horror heroine who instantly discovers hidden survival skills when the bodies start dropping. She gets things wrong, makes questionable choices, and somehow has to keep moving anyway.
“Nora isn’t your traditional final girl; she screws up constantly and is spectacularly ill-equipped for what’s happening around her.”
In other words, perfection isn't part of Nora's survival plan. Buzzkill would rather give horror fans somebody messy enough to make every decision a little less predictable and potentially a lot more fun to watch.
Agudong gets to balance the two sides of Buzzkill's tone, playing Nora through both the comedy of her increasingly chaotic situation and the very real danger closing in around her. Garrard has specifically praised Agudong's comic instincts and the heart she found in the character, which should help keep Nora likable even when her decision-making leaves something to be desired. Agudong is also headed into Mike Flanagan's new Carrie series, so her scream résumé is getting busy.
Bassinger comes to Buzzkill fresh off Final Destination Bloodlines, giving her another trip into a horror world where things can go catastrophically wrong very quickly. Exactly where she fits into this particular nightmare is being kept under wraps, so we'll resist assigning suspicious behavior before we've even met her character. The conspiracy board can wait until September 25.
Internet personality, fashion creator, musician, and English Teacher actor Aliyah's Interlude brings a completely different background to the ensemble. Garrard has described the group as a “lovable, dysfunctional sorority,” making Aliyah part of a cast built around distinct personalities colliding once the party turns into something much more dangerous.
Kealeboga Masango, Angela Daytona Wu, Jessie Diepeveen, Atara Leigh Jawahir, Frances Sholto-Douglas, Alessa Maria-Dione, and Gemma French round out the ensemble, giving the killer a very crowded party to crash.
Buzzkill premieres September 25 exclusively on Tubi. The movie is rated TV-MA, runs 1 hour and 36 minutes, and Tubi's upcoming page is already live so viewers can set a reminder before the killer officially clocks in.
Nora may have trouble remembering what's happening. You don't have to.
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