Night of the Reaper

The pleasure provided by Brandon Christensen's Night of the Reaper is immediate and decidedly tactile: a babysitter, a creaky house, and the kind of analog threat you can almost hear hissing through the tracking lines. The film's opening, with Emily (Summer H. Howell) juggling two children, a hidden cigarette, and the unsettling feeling that the house has new rules that night, plays out like a standalone short film that understands exactly why this subgenre works. Notes appear where they shouldn't, doors seem to have a will of their own, and then the skull-masked character enters the frame as a camera flashes its red light. It's classic staging with a VHS twist, revealing a filmmaker who knows the grammar of '80s horror down to the punctuation.

From there, the film clearly splits in two. On one side, Deena, played by Jessica Clement, who returns from college and reluctantly replaces her best friend Savannah Miller for a last-minute babysitting job, discovers that the quiet night is a lie that suburbs tell themselves. On the other, the town sheriff, played with weary, restrained impatience by Ryan Robbins, begins to receive packages like cursed pen pals: garage door remotes, souvenirs, and those provocative tapes labeled with their own snuff film titles. The parallel editing between Deena's growing nervousness and the sheriff's meticulous investigation gives the film a sustained pace; it's a slasher that never stops glancing at the scoreboard. When the TV cart buzzes and a tape comes to life, the film leans so heavily into its concept that you can almost smell the hot plastic.

Period details can easily veer into cosplay, but here, the production embodies the '80s rather than winking at them. Houses are paneled and lived-in, Halloween decorations are beautifully standardized rather than carefully curated, and analog textures aren't just garnish, they're woven into the mechanics of the plot. Clayton Moore's camera favors smooth, unsettling glides over ostentatious flourishes, letting the compositions do the work for him, and when the image shifts to home video footage, the editing itself feels threatening. This formal choice pays off in a trio of Reaper tapes: The Babysitter, The Camper, and a later, nastier entry—where Brandon Christensen's editing treats the killer's footage as both evidence and weaponry. The synthetic soundtrack by Michelle Osis, Terry Benn, and David Arcus keeps pace with a clear, no-frills pulse; it references tradition without clinging to it.

Performance-wise, the film benefits from faces that play honesty rather than iconography. Jessica Clement is a solid, understated pillar; she calibrates Deena's wary decency without smoothing out the edges, and when the house begins to test her, she doesn't turn into a superhero, but she learns quickly. Ryan Robbins finds a pleasant and irritating rhythm in the role of a lawman who is both galvanized and blinded by grief, credible enough that you trust him, but unstable enough that you probably shouldn't trust him. Around them, Haddie, played by Savannah Miller, brings just the right amount of small-town chaos, Ben Cockell uses a camera and bad timing as weapons, Bryn Samuel plays the jock with a natural shrug, and Keegan Connor Tracy stands out as a federal agent who finds himself in the wrong county at the wrong time. Even the dispatch office has its own personality: Matty Finochio's deputy and Sofie Kane's receptionist carve out human rhythms within a genre machine. And yes, the curse of child actors is skillfully avoided: Max Christensen is truly convincing without falling into precociousness.

The way the film uses space provides a practical thrill. The sheriff's house, a maze of alcoves, basement nooks, and a courtyard that turns into a silhouette faster than one would like, becomes a geography lesson taught under duress. A game of hide-and-seek in the middle of the film, using walkie-talkies, serves as a guided tour, so that later, when a door opens with a sigh or the camera finds an abandoned corridor, we know exactly what is happening on the other side. The parallel with the police station also helps: the fluorescent blandness of the evidence room makes the images on the tape even more sinister, and the pace of the investigation (interrogations, false leads, little office flirtations) anchors the film in routine just long enough for the next box to come along and disrupt that routine. When Clayton Moore plunges us into these VHS inserts, the contrast does a lot of the work.

If you want the unreserved version, stop at the end of the second act: this is an agile, nasty, and cleverly assembled slasher-cop movie that draws suspense from silence and format. The reservations appear with the revelations. The finale piles on multiple twists—some of which truly reframe what you've seen, others feel like unfinished homework—and Brandon Christensen and Ryan Christensen's screenplay sometimes confuses obfuscation with mystery. You sense a desire to stay one step ahead of a savvy audience; the risk is that the web of motivations and timelines begins to warp under the weight of its own ingenuity. Some key dynamics have real impact; others feel like the film is telling you “gotcha” instead of letting you feel it.

For a film so invested in format, it is subtly and revealingly attentive to ethics. A subplot involving the death of animals is handled off-screen, but it will be a red line for some viewers; the film knows it's provocative and uses it to darken the atmosphere around the killer, even if it also risks tipping the balance between terror and disgust. Elsewhere, a late image in the basement—wedding fabric floating in a dull light—says more about the character than two minutes of dialogue. Even when the story provides more answers than it can juggle elegantly, the images continue to argue in its favor.

As an exercise in style, Night of the Reaper works as an effective double act: a hunt in the shadows for Deena, and a tense thriller for the sheriff, all linked by a deliberately analog-style mise-en-scène. The film is more powerful when it simply moves forward without justification, carried by its strengths—a polished visual texture, a controlled tempo, finely calibrated performances, and an inventive use of media within media. Its limitations, on the other hand, appear in a somewhat overloaded ending and a few script inconsistencies that give the impression of having been patched up after the fact, pitfalls that are almost inevitable in the contemporary twist genre. Yet, in a landscape saturated with retro references, Brandon Christensen's film finds a unique path: it doesn't treat the 1980s as a mere backdrop, but as a real narrative constraint, reminding us that a creaking door, prolonged just long enough, remains more frightening than a long explanatory paragraph.

When putting together your October selection to celebrate Halloween, this title deserves a prominent place: watch it on Shudder for its promising opening, follow Jessica Clement and Ryan Robbins who ensure continuity, and take its final act with a grain of salt, as it tries too hard to impress where a more sober resolution would have sufficed. The tapes, fetish objects at the heart of the story, become trophies and reminders: the medium can also be a sharp weapon, as long as one resists the temptation to say too much.

Night of the Reaper
Directed by Brandon Christensen
Written by Brandon Christensen, Ryan Christensen
Produced by Seager Dixon, David Hiatt, Matt Manjourides, Justin A. Martell, Michael Peterson
Starring Jessica Clement, Ryan Robbins, Summer H. Howell, Keegan Connor Tracy, Matty Finochio, Max Christensen, Ben Cockell, David Feehan, Bryn Samuel, Karolina Turek, Savannah Miller, Susan Serrao, Huxley Fisher, Isla Spencer, Sofie Kane, Deborah Ferguson, Blair Young, Jocelyn Chugg, Lonni Olson, Drake Seipert
Cinematography: Clayton Moore
Edited by Brandon Christensen, Blair Drover
Music by David Arcus, Terry Benn, Michelle Osis
Production companies: Not the Funeral Home, Superchill
Distributed by IFC Films (United States), Shudder (United States)
Release dates: September 19, 2025 (United States)
Running time: 93 minutes

Seen on September 17, 2025 (press screener)

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