From its opening sequence, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is hard-coded as a product from the second half of the Eighties. It is not just the cathode ray television playing music videos on MTV, or the kitchen fridge containing drink cans labelled Coca-Cola Classic, or the touch-tone phone in the living room, but also the unfolding scenario, familiar from many a slasher, in which teen babysitter Emily Golding (Summer H. Howell) finds herself and her two younger wards Mark (Huxley Fisher) and Marina (Isla Spencer) coming under attack from a intruder in robe and death’s skull mask, intent on toying with this helpless prey before moving in for the kill.
The key reference points for this prologue are classic – which is to say early – slashers like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Fred Walton’s When A Stranger Calls (1979). Of course, by the late Eighties in which the prologue is set, the slasher genre was in its last gasp, at least until the mid-Nineties postmodern revival – but nonetheless the relative novelty of home rental was giving these films a second life, finding them a younger audience beyond the grindhouse and the drive-in that was their natural habitat. This new medium is reflexively acknowledged not just by the tracking static that appears on-screen beneath the titles as though the film were being replayed on VHS, but by a killer who uses camcorders to document the victims’ deaths for a private tape collection.
“Jesus, I hate horror movies,” comments police deputy Butch (Matty Finochio) about the campsite killing footage on a VHS that was sent anonymously to Creedy Creek’s police department, but Sheriff Rod Arnold (Ryan Robbins) immediately realises that what they have is a snuff video revealing a real, local murder from a few years back that was ruled an accident at the time. Bitter, tightly wound Rod, a widower and single parent who has never got over the death – also supposedly accidental – of his wife, casts aside due process in his single-minded pursuit of a killer who, in deliberately leaving a trail of clues, evidently wishes to be caught. Meanwhile in a parallel narrative, when Haddie (Savannah Miller) falls ill, her best friend Deena (Jessica Clement), recently home from university where she is studying chemistry and criminology, takes over her babysitting gig looking after the sheriff’s ‘perfect boy’ Max (the director’s son Max Christensen) in an old, remote house – and soon she is, like Emily before her, being stalked by a masked figure with a camera and homicidal intent.
Director Christensen co-writes with his brother Ryan – and both cameo, at least in text form, in a visible poster for “RB Christensen Real Estate” placed modestly in front of the murder house from the beginning that Butch suggests “no one will every buy”. In fact the Christensens’ script is full of sophisticated signifiers. The full names of Rod’s deputy Butch Cassidy or of the Forest Service officer Liz Talbert (Keegan Connor Tracy) are also eponyms for, respectively, a historical anti-heroic outlaw and a fictive small-town private investigator, establishing certain associations that broadly, if obliquely, play out in the film. Emily’s not-too-bright boyfriend Chad (Ben Cockell) proves hilariously Chad-dy, and when confronted by the police for his (now suspicious seeming) habit of constantly filming people with a camcorder, insists – in words that resonate intertextually with Michael Powell’s similarly themed work of scopophilia, sadism and slaughter – “I ain’t no peeping tom.”
All these narrative breadcrumbs serve to confound as much as to guide, in a twisty tale of serial murder and calculated revenge, filled with red herrings, false paths and carefully calculated traps. Night of the Reaper offers a peculiar kind of negative nostalgia for a specific video-age past that is perhaps better left buried and mythologised – which is to say that, without ever quite displaying the overtly clever-clever self-refereniality of films like Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) which would emerge in its chronological wake, this is nonetheless an intricate and refined entry in the slasher canon that looks both backwards and forwards in its simultaneous capture, cover-up and creation of a cold-blooded killer.
strap: In Brandon Christensen’s sophisticated Eighties-set small-town slasher, a masked killer toys with a grieving sheriff and female student
© Anton Bitel
