Interview: Night’s End director Jennifer Reeder on loving horror, making an isolated film, and casting Michael Shannon

The streaming service Shudder has cornered the market on the horror genre since its 2015 inception.  Known for housing horror classics, as well as distributing its own original films, Shudder has allowed genre enthusiasts and filmmakers to explore their macabre mentality.  One such director doing so is Jennifer Reeder, whose latest effort, the supernatural scarer Night’s End, a claustrophobic thriller about a shut-in and his potentially haunted apartment, is now streaming.

To coincide with the film’s release, Peter Gray spoke with Jennifer about her love of the genre, how in-depth her research was regarding the psyche behind shut-ins, and how she managed to get Michael Shannon to say yes to her modest film.

Congratulations on the film.  It’s clear that you have a great relationship with Shudder, but what about with the horror genre itself? You appear like someone who appreciates the genre.

I don’t think people would look at my earlier work and think they’re adjacent to horror, necessarily, but I’ve always been a filmmaker that’s always leaned into really fantastical worlds, and surreal worlds, and dark worlds.  All of those things are much more evident in the films I’ve been making more recently.  I was always a filmmaker who wanted to lean into the darkness, but as a consumer I’m a customer who, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, goes right to horror every single time.  Sometimes I think, “Oh, maybe I’ll find something gory in the action section”, but I’m not going to drama and I’m not going to comedy.

I’m the same.  I probably started watching horror movies when I was far too young, but it stuck with me.  Horror has always been a successful market, but I feel like these last two years it’s a genre that has truly thrived, and, in large part, that’s thanks to services like Shudder.  And with Night’s End you explore the fantastical and the supernatural.  Is that a subgenre of horror you favour in particular?

With Night’s End in particular, and it was a film I didn’t write, the story came to me already written.  This is only the second film I’ve ever made that I didn’t write, and in talking to (screenwriter) Brett (Neveu) about getting it to a place that we could make it, I knew exactly how to craft that world.  I knew how we were going to light it, how we were going to frame it, and I knew the sound design and the score.  I knew how to craft this very particular interior.  I really liked the parallel of Brett’s grounded dialogue and the grounded performances with the chaos of the story.

When I first got the script, (the character of) Ken wasn’t really a shut-in.  I said that we had to make him a shut-in, because it was so important that he couldn’t leave (his apartment).  Like a regular person, if you move into an apartment and it’s haunted, you break your lease (laugh), but of course that’s not a fun scary movie.  Once you go into that apartment at the beginning of the film, you do not leave it until the end, and it’s a very different experience at the end.

I liked that Ken did seem like someone who, if he wasn’t a shut-in, would say “I’m out!” when it comes to the supernatural activity he starts to experience.  When looking into the characteristics of someone who is a shut-in, did you have to do much research so that his portrayal was authentic?

Making this a little over a year into a global pandemic, it wasn’t too difficult to ask around and see what personal habits people had.  To see how their daily routines had been forced to change.  I don’t want this to feel like a quarantine film, but it is an isolation film, so I did a lot of asking around about routines and habits.  I watched a lot of shut-in films (too) to make sure I wasn’t replicating.  I did a lot of reading up on shut-ins and agoraphobia, and the anxiety around social contact.

And on the mention of Ken, Geno Walker is an actor I am not overly familiar with, and I always like when a cast doesn’t necessarily come with a “star” expectation.  But on the other end of that, you have Michael Shannon involved.  How did the casting come about for you?

Michael and his wife, Kate Arrington, who plays his wife in the film, they travel back and forth between Chicago and New York because he’s a founder of A Red Orchid Theatre.  And his co-founder is the actor Lawrence Grimm, who plays our exorcist, so we already had this connection to him.  On one hand we wanted to keep it Chicago based, and there’s a never a shortage of great Chicago actors, but I knew in particular that I wanted to specifically cast a larger statured African American actor.  I knew (Ken) was going to be better if he was this 6’3, takes up the doorway-type guy, and we look at him through this very soft, tender lens.  We light him through pastels, and he seems so vulnerable.  And Geno was great for that.

Night’s End is now streaming on Shudder.

Peter Gray

Film critic with a penchant for Dwayne Johnson, Jason Momoa, Michelle Pfeiffer and horror movies, harbouring the desire to be a face of entertainment news.