Night of the Reaper (Branden Christensen, 2025)

Over the past few years, there have been a slew of slasher films trading on eighties nostalgia. It’s a Wonderful Knife, Totally Killer, both trade on the period for laughs. In a Violent Nature finds a new narrative framework to put a spin on the Friday the 13th formula. Even as it’s not set in the eighties, the Terrifier franchise is very much trading on the nostalgia for the slasher films of that decade by reaching for the aesthetics and tone. To be blunt, I find eighties nostalgia pieces grating, for the most part, so my expectations of Night of the Reaper were low.

Night of the Reaper, like The Black Phone (set in 1978), is more akin to a period piece. They're both set in the past, but they're not indulging in either rose colored nostalgia or treating the time as an aesthetic, repackaging, and re-serving through the lens of the film and television of the time presented them, like Totally Killer. Additionally, Night of the Reaper does attempt to find it's way to telling a compelling story, while also serving up the tension and suspense the best slasher films revel in.

Director Brandon Christensen has developed a fruitful relationship with Shudder. The streaming service picked up his previous film, Super Host, and debuted it as an exclusive, as it's done with Night of the Reaper. Where Super Host certainly shares DNA with the slasher sub genre, it's something different, and by the very nature of its story more contemporary. It has a vein of very dark humor running through it as well.

Here, Christensen jettisons the humor, and sets up a very traditional slasher film. There is the whodunit aspect, the paced revelations, the red herrings, and he also found a way to incorporate traditional revenge aspect, while giving a fresh feel. Jessica Clement is quite good in the lead too, giving a performance that's authentic in its understatement, and which transforms into an almost exaggerated kind of stillness when it needs to be more than that.

Night of the Reaper works as a period piece. The costume and set design are spot on for small town America in the eighties, as is the score which succeeds in using synths to create its own score, without it feeling like either cheap imitation or cheap nostalgia. There is a short scene that I can't help but feel is an homage to specific scene in Ti West's House of the Devil, that understands what made it work in that film. Again, it feels like a well placed and well considered homage, without feeling like cheap imitation.

It's the bit of innovation Christensen brings to the story that most made this worth seeing, for me. It is a little rough around the edges, but if he can find his way to polishing it a bit more, developing a more thorough sense of how to give that innovation and its revelation more impact, Christensen is going to be putting out some excellent films. There's already a sense of vision, strong grasp of creating and building tension, on top of the rest of the filmmaking being on the better side of competent. There are also a few standout images that show a budget and the right cinematographer could give him an opportunity to explore the visual imagination they suggest.

The one failing it suffers from is a bit of lag in the middle. The same way that further experience and practice may help give more polish and impact to the aspects of his storytelling which diverge from the formula, it will likely also solve the problem of a middle section feeling a bit thin and repetitive.