It’s becoming trickier than ever before in film to breathe life into the familiar. With the pressure to surprise and shock audiences with something new, especially in the horror genre, it can be a daunting task. However, in Brandon Christensen’s latest horror feature, Night of the Reaper, he, along with his brother, screenwriter Ryan Christensen, takes the familiar and shifts it slightly to upend expectations. Just when you think you have everything figured out, you don’t.
In a quiet ‘80s suburb, sporadic murders plague a town’s sheriff, who is already struggling to deal with his own personal tragedies. One night, he receives a series of cryptic packages, leading him on a chase with the killer, in the hopes that he may be able to unravel this longstanding mystery. The same night, Deena, a college student, returns home and takes up a babysitting gig. Little does she know, she may have found herself the next target of the killer. Time will tell if both the sheriff and Deena make it through the night alive and intact in Night of the Reaper.
For the upcoming release of Night of the Reaper, we talked to co-writer/director Brandon Christensen and Jessica Clement, who plays Deena, about the film. Throughout our conversation, we discussed the inception and evolution of the film’s story, navigating the complexities of our leading protagonist, and occasionally getting sidetracked by the embrace of all things cozy.
To start things off, Brandon, there are a lot of throwbacks to ‘80s babysitter-focused horror. Can you talk a little bit about inspiration, how the initial story started, and how it evolved to where the final script ended up?
Brandon Christensen: I saw When A Stranger Calls back when I was a kid, and it always stuck with me. That first 20 minutes, no one ever talks about the rest of that movie, but the first 20 minutes are amazing. It’s just like the perfect cold open. I’m sure others did similar things, but that feels like the template to me, like Scream and The Ring and some other movies [did]. It seems to be a thing where you start off with this big, bombastic intro and scare the pants off the audience, just so they’re kind of hooked going into the rest.
When my brother and I first discussed it, we wanted to start with that. However, my brother went off on his own and wrote what you’re seeing on screen, which includes the killing of Emily. We had talked prior to that, just about how we wanted to take this film and do something interesting with it, because these days, you’re trying to get the audience to see something new. You know, it’s hard. It’s hard. These days, there are so many movies. The audience has seen everything.
A big part of the script and the whole process of writing it was like, how do we make this feel like it’s one thing when it’s actually something totally different? Every decision in the script-writing process was that. Like, okay, what are we going to actually show here? What does the audience think here? So that later, you can never expect someone to watch a movie again, but if they did, they would see an entirely different story playing out, because they have the understanding of where it’s going.
And so, a big part of that is just using these things, like these homages that we have to these movies, like Scream, House of the Devil, and making the audience feel like, oh yeah, no, I’ve seen this before. That guy’s the killer. They get it, and they’re jumping on, guessing, and totally ignoring the thing we’ve been setting up the entire time, because it’s not supposed to be that way.
For us, it was just a matter of, like, let’s lean on the cozy while we’re setting up the crazy. I’ve never said that before, but I’m going to use it again. [laughs]
Jessica Clement: That’s good. That’s a really good quote.
I’m now wondering if this would constitute as cozy horror because that is now a thing. Cozy horror.
Brandon Christensen: Yeah, for sure. Everything cozy is great. I want to watch my favorites. That’s why The Office is so popular. People just want to turn it on and watch the characters they love and be cozy. Doesn’t challenge you at all. You’re like, ‘Yeah, this is a nice book and a blanket kind of thing.’ It’s just cozy.
Jessica Clement: That was the biggest challenge for me, was to try to balance portraying this seemingly final girl to what is familiar to everybody, but then adding little easter eggs the whole way through that, if you were to rewatch it, you would pick up on right away, but again, not making it so obvious that you would pick up on it when you watch it the first time. So that was a tough balance.
What was really important too, when I did my audition, we didn’t do any of the like, genre stuff. We didn’t scream and cry, or anything like that. I sent stuff to Brandon later, because I was like, Do you want to know that I can do this? But what was more important to him was making Deena a very grounded, believable character, so that we could play with that balance. Because if all we cared about was my ability to scream and cry, then it would be harder to play that kind of subtle balance.
So, it was a challenge, but one that was really fun to take on.
Brandon Christensen: I honestly think being normal and being good is so hard for an actor. Just to be a normal person, like having a conversation about nothing with a friend, is so much harder than screaming and crying, from my experience and working with actors. Because you’re being yourself, but you’re not being yourself. It’s this offshoot of it.
That’s the most important thing, because for 60 minutes of this movie, she’s just a normal girl going through a kind of weird night. And so that’s huge, because I know she’s going to do the other stuff. She’s got the look for it. She’s perfect. And so, if she weren’t, I’d just [jokingly] yell at her until she got there.
Jessica Clement: When you’re acting something that’s closer to you, then you have all these kind of familiar muscles being used. So, it can be easy to slip into just being yourself, but when you’re playing something so far from yourself, because I don’t normally scream and cry in terror, then it’s easier. So, I agree with that. That’s good for you to learn as a director. That’s really cool. I haven’t heard that before.
If it’s okay, I’m going to ask about Max [Christensten] making his feature debut. For you, Brandon, what was it like directing your son, and for Jess, being a guiding influence in scenes with him? There’s something about working with family that’s both fun and terrifying.
Jessica Clement: I’ll go first so you can talk talk about him because you should be so proud. Honestly, one thing about me is I’m not a kid girl. I don’t want kids, and usually they just annoy me, if I’m honest. Knowing that I was going to be working with a kid was a little scary to me, and when I first met Max. I was like, ‘Hey, first of all, this is a cute kid.’ Like, even for somebody that doesn’t like kids, this is a cute kid. And he was so respectful, calm, mature, and eager to learn. That’s one kid I like. I don’t have one bad thing to say about him, and he did a phenomenal job.
Brandon Christensen: I worked with him a bunch in the past. I’ve shot little horror shorts with him and stuff like that during quarantine and all that stuff, just because we were bored. I always knew he had something about him. He was always performing at home. He’s always just bounding around. He’s just like that “It” kid.
We just had our ‘Meeting the Teacher’ thing for the new school year, and he’s going into the fifth grade, and his teacher was like, ‘Oh, I know Max, because of his popularity.’ People just glob on to him. He’s just like a presence. No matter where he goes, he just has this energy. I knew he would be able to do this role because I thought, ‘It’s not a crazy, difficult role,’ but again, he has to be a normal kid, which is always tough.
For me, the hardest part was just that parenting and directing are different skills, and there is some crossover, for sure, but I can’t get upset with him if he doesn’t hit a mark the way I might if he doesn’t finish his dinner. There’s just a different thing. And there’s also the feeling of people watching and being like, ‘Oh, it’s a Nepo baby. He only got the job because he’s my son,’ and it’s like he did, but I’ve got years of working with him and being around him, so I knew that he could do this.
Casting a kid is always brutally difficult, especially when we’re making a Canadian horror film. There are a lot of great kids who have come up. Jacob Tremblay is a huge one, but I’ve worked with Jett Klyne on Z, and he’s blown up since then, too. But it’s always tough. So having this in my back pocket, being like, ‘No, I know Max is going to come. He’s going to do the job, and it’s going to be great.’ That’s going to be fine.
It took him a day, because he was with us six days, it took him a minute to understand the set etiquette and how you do it, but by like, day two, he was just fitting right in. He’s not a kid on set. He’s just an actor on set, and everybody respected him, which was great because that’s always your fear going in with a son/parent relationship while directing and stuff. It can be complicated, but everybody quickly realized, like, oh no, he’s going to be good.
Jessica Clement: The one thing I’ll add is, I loved when he would look to Brandon for approval, but not so much director approval, and more so like dad approval, because he would give a direction and he’d do it and immediately look at Brandon, and Brandon would have to hide and be like, ‘Don’t look at me, buddy. Just stay in it.’ It was so cute because he just wanted to obey. I don’t know what the word [I’m looking for is]. He wanted to appease.
Make dad proud.
Jessica Clement: Yeah.
Brandon Christensen: Yeah, exactly, and he did. I’m very proud of him.
Night of the Reaper is available on Shudder starting September 19, 2025. Watch the trailer below.
Images courtesy of Shudder.
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