film scholar charles derry views "kalifornia" as part of a historical trend of serial killer films released in the early 1990s, popularized by the success of jonathan demme's "the silence of the lambs" (1991). derry interprets the film's misspelled title as a "political attack on those fascist qualities within amerika which breed such violence," and also draws parallels between its aesthetic elements to those of "psycho" (1960). furthermore, derry considers the climactic sequence setting at the dreamland nuclear testing site as an "image of armageddon" symbolic of the hiroshima and nagasaki bombings, which themselves "should be considered government-sanctioned serial killings on a massive scale."