In horror, Halloween spells bad news for babysitters, something a young college student discovers the hard way when a masked killer resurfaces in Shudder Original Night of the Reaper.
Night of the Reaper, which hails from director Brandon Christensen (Still/Born, Z, Superhost, The Puppetman), who co-wrote the Halloween horror movie with Ryan Christensen, debuts on Shudder on September 19.
The film’s synopsis reads, “In the heart of a quiet, 1980s suburb, college student Deena returns home and reluctantly takes on a last-minute babysitting job. That same night, the local sheriff receives a cryptic package that pulls him into a sinister scavenger hunt that sets off a game of cat and mouse with a dangerous killer. As the clues unravel, Deena finds herself ensnared in a nightmarish mystery that she may not survive.”
Summer H. Howell (Hunter Hunter, Cult of Chucky), Jessica Clement (“Gen V”, Dream Scenario), Ryan Robbins (The Thicket, Apollo 18), and Keegan Connor Tracy (Z, Final Destination 2) star.
Our exclusive trailer and poster reveal, below, introduces the masked Reaper wreaking havoc on Deena’s return from college, but don’t expect a straightforward Halloween set slasher.
Christensen, who cites House of the Devil and When a Stranger Calls as formative horror films and sources of inspiration, wanted to put his stamp on the subgenre without retreading familiar ground. When Christensen began production on Superhost, he and his brother Ryan began talking about the idea behind Night of the Reaper and toying with the babysitter archetype.
“That started this idea of, ‘Okay, well, how are we gonna build this? My brother wrote the opening, the first 10 pages or so, and he sent it to me while I was shooting. I was just like, ‘Holy shit, this is so well realized.’ Then he just kept going, we worked together after, and we started to find our pathway through, but it was a love letter to the 80s,” the director tells BD.
It’s not just the babysitter that provides a fresh angle, but Christensen’s trademark penchant for playing with conventional formats. In the case of Night of the Reaper, produced by Not The Funeral Home, the masked killer makes eerie use of VHS, bringing found footage into the mix.
“It’s something my wife brought up to me recently, that in every movie I’ve done, I’ve played with format. In Stillborn, there’s the baby monitor, and with Z, there’s the old home videotape from when she was a kid. Superhost does all the vlogging; The Puppetman has the sleepwalking tapes. Bodycam, which is coming out next year, is obviously full found footage. But with this one, you’re playing with the ’80s, and it serves as a tool that you can use to change up the film a little bit. It also allows you to kind of do these Sinister-like vignettes that are filling out the story and giving you a little bit of horror in a storyline that really isn’t that horrific until the end,” the filmmaker explains.
As for the killer’s Halloween mask, the design serves a dual purpose as its iconography becomes recurring.
“A lot of it was having this constant reminder in this small town that there’s this killer that’s out there. But at the end of the day, Halloween is such an amazing time of year, just the colors alone and everything, and trying to do a film with that and timing it with the actual trees was a fun challenge to tackle.”
