Director – Jennifer Reeder, Screenplay – Brett Neveu, Producers – Neal Edelstein, Brett Neveu & David E. Tolchinsky, Photography – Christopher Rejano, Music – Coastaldives, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nick Johnson, Makeup Effects – J. Anthony Kosar, Prosthetics/Creature Effects – Kosart Studiios, Production Design – Adri Siriwatt. Production Company – Shudder/Crow Island Films/Institutional Quality Films.
Cast
Geno Walker (Ken Barber), Kate Arrington (Kelsey Dees), Felonious Munk (Terry Gilson), Lawrence Grimm (Colin Albertson), Michael Shannon (Isaac Dees), Daniel Kyri (Dark Corners), Theo Germaine (Lyden Knight)
Plot
Ken Barber lives in isolation in the apartment where he has moved to after splitting with his wife Kelsey. He places all his efforts into creating a series of instructional online videos. His friend Terry Gilson notices one of Ken’s ornamental birds spontaneously fall over in the background of one of the videos and suggests that maybe the apartment is haunted. Terry also suggests that Ken post the video to one of the ghost hunter video channels to get some attention for his channel. As other incidents occur, Ken starts to go down a rabbit hole where he consults possibly fraudulent online ghost experts and buys spirit jars in an effort to capture the ghost. He comes to believe that he is dealing with the spirit of a girl who may have murdered back in the 1910s.
Night’s End was the third film from Jennifer Reeder, who had previously made the films Signature Move (2017) and Knives and Skin (2019) and the Holy Hell episode of V/H/S/94 (2021) and, subsequent to this, the horror film Perpetrator (2023). The film premiered on the Shudder network.
Night’s End is clearly a film made during the Covid pandemic lockdown. The entire film is about people locked in solitary confinement in their apartments only communicating by video messaging apps and never interacting in person. Those on the videolinks include Kate Arrington as Geno Walker’s ex-wife and several appearances from Kate’s real-life husband, the film’s best known name Michael Shannon. The end credits reveals that the film had a 2021 copyright date, meaning that it would have been shooting at the height of the Covid lockdown, even though it was not released until March 2022.
Geno Walker in isolation in his apartment
Within the limitations that she has – ie. shooting inside an apartment and with only one actor reacting to but never meeting other people on a video screen – Jennifer Reeder does quite well in generating atmosphere. There is a creepiness as we see the bird figurine unexpectedly fall over in the back of a shot, or shadowy figures briefly glimpsed walking past in the background and later the appearance of something with glowing orange eyes. The Haunted House genre has felt worn out of all moves in the last decade but Reeder creates something new by largely not worrying too much about classic tropes and plot devices and in creating a quite different confined space where the story plays out.
Night’s End has similarities to Host (2020), the first horror film made during the Covid pandemic, which has a similar plot about a group of people coming together by video messenger and conducting a séance that raises an unwelcome spirit. Night’s End does some of this better than Host – the entirety of Host took place with the video screen emulating video windows on a computer screen, whereas Reeder uses mostly regular dramatic shots and as a result creates more atmosphere. The point that Night’s End started to fall into the schlocky for me was where we get an abrupt reversal at the end as the séance turns into a full occult ritual, whereupon the subtle atmosphere up to that point is replaced by silly effects with glowing eyed figures appearing everywhere.
