Crampton Watch: Dead Night (2017)

Watched:  10/07/2026

Format:  Amazon?

Viewing:  First

Director:  Brad Baruh

Someday I should go to Fantastic Fest here in Austin.  JAL does it every year, and it's a whole scene.  I guess a decade ago Dead Night (2017) was included, and co-star Barbara Crampton was actually there with some of the rest of the cast.  That would be great.

Dead Night seems like a movie that made sense on paper, and would work great as a horror comic book.  As a movie, it has some structural issues that maybe keep it from knocking it out of the park, because it's well acted, had a good location/set, and - in the end - the overall concept is something I liked.

But I didn't think much of the movie for maybe the first thirty minutes.  As we made the turn into the last ten minutes or so I thought "well, that was kind of clever".  It didn't knock my socks off, but I was impressed with the notion of the movie.  

A family of four with a terminally ill father is going to stay at a get-away cabin for one last family hoorah.  The son is a recent high school graduate and the high-schooler daughter brings her pal.  Things are a bit tense due to Dad's condition and Mom's general stress-levels.  They're also out of cell-phone range as part of the fun.

We start seeing some footage of a very 00's and 10's-type true crime series detailing how the mother went crazy and killed her family with an axe.  So already we know - well, that's how this ends.

But then the dad, who has been looking for wood comes back from the forest with Barbara Crampton in tow, passed out.  She was just out there in the dark and snow when we found her, which is odd as, previously, we'd flipped from more true crime coverage (starring a straight-faced Daniel Roebuck) to a campaign advertisement for Crampton running for office.  

But the family doesn't recognize her as anyone in particular and tries to help her, and she suddenly seems fine - maybe a bit overly energetic and a tad rude.  

Did I mention we also keep seeing weird, uncanny beasties in the woods?

Anyway, what unspools is not what the true crime show thinks happened.  At all.

SPOILERS

Crampton, who is kind of hilarious in this, turns out to be a witch - or at least in league with witches.  And she violently turns the family, one-by-one, into murder zombies all chasing down the mom.  The witches are using televisions as a sort of scrying pool, and seeing the future - a future they can manipulate.  So, the TV show we saw was not, technically, out of chronological order - and that ad for Crampton's campaign is directing the witches what to do next to manage coming events.

The cast is surprisingly good and well-directed.  This is not someone who just grabbed some friends and said "we're gonna put on a show!"  And Crampton is kind of a delight.

vote for me.  I'll just get on with it and bring The Darkness

.

But, the movie had some odd pacing issues and whatnot.  It's the kind of thing that's usually way worse in indie horror movies that I don't wind up writing about because I turn them off 5 to 20 minutes in (I'll finish one of these and then talk about it in the coming days).  But everything feels distended for the first thirty minutes and then, suddenly, the film takes off and doesn't slow down for anything.  Normally I'd call that a win, but it becomes just a series of things happening.

In some ways, this feels like a short film someone made last for 85 minutes.  That extension includes a flashback scene to the 1960's that made me think I'd seen this before until I realized I was thinking of Night of the Creeps.

I had been concerned this was a movie that flew Crampton out for 2 days of shooting and thrown her on the poster to draw sales, but she's in the movie a considerable amount.  I believe the woman who plays the mother, Brea Grant, is both a UT grad (Go Horns!) and the director of Crampton's more recent film, Grind, which I have not seen yet.