Night of the Slasher

Directed by Shant Hamassian

Starring: Lily Berlina, Scott Javore, and Adam Lesar

Uploaded May 11, 2015

Watch our review on Night of the Slasher

Logline: A teenage girl must commit horror movie sins such as drink alcohol, do drugs, and have sex to lure a killer and finish him off.

Stills taken from Night of the Slasher (2015) Review by Paul Catalanotto

Shant Hamassian’s Night of the Slasher might be one of the most festival-dominant short films I’ve come across. With over 200 festival selections, 60 award wins, an Oscar qualification, featured on Alter, and even a mention in Forbes, it stands as one of the most widely recognized and positively received short films in the last decade. The marketing is also exceptional, backed by a website that feels as polished as the film itself. It’s the kind of presentation that makes sense because the film earns every second of its eleven-minute runtime.

Can you tell I’m impressed by this movie?

Shot to appear as a single continuous take, Night of the Slasher opens with Jenelle (Lily Berlina) breaking every rule in the horror playbook. And if you’ve seen enough slashers, you know that you never want to break the rules. From the outset, we see she’s already been through something brutal, hinted at by a disturbing throat wound that suggests this isn’t her first encounter with what’s coming.

She scratches the expected beats off her list with intent rather than fear. She blares a fantastic original called Dying for Love, which I found to be a loving nod to 80’s slashers. She seduces a character that is simply known as “The Bait” (Scott Javoure) on IMDB with controlled precision. She drinks a dangerous amount of beer, sets the stage, and prepares for the killer she knows is coming.

We all do.

When he finally arrives, dressed in a Leonard Nimoy mask, a clever inversion of the iconic William Shatner mask from Halloween, he falls right into her trap and kills her date instead.

But that’s exactly what she wants.

What follows is a relentless, darkly comic battle between Jenelle and a seemingly supernatural slasher entity that refuses to stay down. She defeats him repeatedly, only for him to return again and again in the familiar logic of the genre, but then maybe it’s all in her head. Their fight is amplified by the film’s controlled camera work, and the illusion that we never see an edit.

The cycle continues until her parents come home, bringing their fight to an abrupt stop. The killer calmly leaves with the victim, an oddly polite exit that lands as a final joke: nothing resets a horror scenario faster than the arrival of parents.

Night of the Slasher works as a sharp, self-aware homage to slasher conventions, executed with slick filmmaking and a confident one-take structure. It raises a simple question that lingers afterward: why this film was never expanded into a feature is hard to understand. It’s tightly made, inventive, and absolutely worth watching.

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