NIGHT OF THE REAPER - Mark Reviews Movies

Night of the Reaper, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

By the end, Night of the Reaper has cheated in too many ways to mention—not only because it would give away too much of third act, but also because each new revelation only reveals more logical gaps and strained acts of misdirection. The screenplay by director Brandon Christensen and his brother Ryan Christensen does explain what has happened in this plot, but an explanation of something this convoluted doesn't, well, actually explain much of anything.

It's stranger still, since the initial premise is simplicity itself. There's an extended prologue, following a babysitter named Emily (Summer H. Howell) on the night she's watching two young kids at their home. Strange things start happening after the children go to bed. A teddy bear that was atop a chair blocking one kid's closet door, because he's scared of a monster being in there, suddenly appears in the living room with a note saying the babysitter is "pretty." It ended up there while Emily was investigating the garage door opening, only to discover that no one is there but that there is a dead dog down the road.

Christensen's staging of this lengthy sequence of strange noises, odd occurrences, doors opening as if on their own, and the sudden horrific revelation that there is an intruder, who has been recording all of these sinister pranks, in the house is quite effective. Each component builds on its own and off of the others, and the whole thing looks and feels like an old-fashioned slasher movie that might have existed in the story's 1980s backdrop.

What we eventually learn some time after that introduction is this incident is not an isolated one in this little town. Rod (Ryan Robbins), the local Sheriff, receives a box at his front steps, and inside is a remote garage door opener. He and his deputy Butch (Matty Finochio) drive to the house where the babysitter had been killed, and sure enough, clicking the button opens the garage. Back at the station, another package awaits the Sheriff. This one is of a videotape that reveals a hiker, found dead in an apparent accident before the babysitter's killing, was also killed by the same perpetrator: someone wearing a skull mask.

The clues keep coming the Sheriff's way, either from the anonymous sender or as he takes the investigation into his own hands. Meanwhile, Deena (Jessica Clement), who has come home to the town on break from college, gets a call from her friend Haddie (Savannah Miller). She was supposed to babysit the Sheriff's young son Max (Max Christensen), but Haddie has come down with a stomach bug. Even though she wants to spend time with her mother and ailing father, Deena agrees to watch the kid for the night.

The Christensens' script mostly does exactly what we expect at that point. Deena starts hearing and seeing strange things, including a cloaked figure and another dog carcass in the neighboring woods. She starts wandering the house, hearing more sounds, noticing that doors are opening on their own, and finding the wedding dress of the Sheriff's dead wife hung up nicely in the basement.

Given what must have been big news in such a small town, one would think the first babysitter's death might make Deena think to call for help or even let the Sheriff know that something is obviously amiss at his house. The movie has an answer for this, but again, it only starts the process of asking even more questions about the logistics of how everything so conveniently fits into place in someone's plan.

Basically, the movie seems to be repeating the same pattern as in its prologue, which makes the whole thing feel anticlimactic and redundant. In reality, though, the filmmakers are playing on those expectations, because the identity of the person in the skull mask is only the beginning of a different battle of wits and game of cat-and-mouse. To even mention the players, of course, would give away too much of what is a genuine surprise or two, although calling them surprises isn't meant to be complimentary here.

They mainly surprise because of how little sense they make. The real plan beneath the movie's superficial horror trappings requires someone to understand what someone else will do with precision, plenty of perfectly timed events happening elsewhere, and a couple of characters not to realize they have been and are being played, even after a character bluntly tells them that's exactly what's happening.

That doesn't even take into account what has happened before the story and off-camera, not to mention important details about characters that are simply hidden from us. Night of the Reaper cheats so much that it's basically making up the rules to the game its playing as it goes.

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