View from my Window: Horror director Jennifer Reeder

Jennifer Reeder, director of new horror film Night's End. Photo: Kinga Michalska

Sadly, in the office there's no window but in my space at home in Chicago where I do all of my creative production there's a big window I look out of on to my backyard. I've populated it with lots of bird feeders, so all year round there are lots of birds. It's like a little aviary in my backyard. I find the birds both whimsical and inspiring but also really calming.

I have lots of windows in my house but I'm someone who doesn't have window coverings on any of them. I like to always be able to see the world outside and know that I'm not trapped within the walls. Conversely, I don't use my overhead lighting when it gets dark. At night I have lots of lamps that all have interesting shades so it never casts a fully white light. My house is often lit like my films. There's something that I find really inspiring about moving through a dramatically lit house at night.

I have an old house that can be a little bit creaky. I have two cats, a dog and a turtle. The cats and the turtle are nocturnal so there's not a night that I don't wake up to some noise where I'm thinking, "What's that? Is there someone in the house?" I feel like there's some aspect of the horror genre built into my daily life.

When I first moved in I had this sense that the house was haunted. Shortly after I had my second son, there was a night I heard him fussing. I was like, "Oh God, okay, I'll go get him." Then I heard these footsteps in the adjacent room where he was, walking back and forth, and then he stopped fussing. I thought, "Oh, his dad must have gone to him." I rolled over and his dad was still in the bed. I didn't even get up, I just thought, "I'm not even going to go into the other room."

My theory is a woman had died in the house who was also a mother and that somehow she went in there and soothed my fussy baby in the middle of the night. But she didn't stay. Maybe that's all she needed was one last cuddle or something.

In the middle of the night if I'm walking through my house I can see if someone's wandering around the neighbourhood. I can see the activity right on the street. I'm always like, "Who is that person?"

It helps me as a storyteller. "Who is that person?" is so often the way I begin writing a script; Who is that person? What are they doing here? At this time of day, wearing that outfit? Or whatever. All of those sorts of questions.

Geno Walker as Ken in Night's End, coming to the horror streaming service Shudder this week. Photo: Supplied.

We shot Night's End in the summer of 2021, almost a year after the murder of George Floyd, which really amplified the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and drew a lot of attention to many other previous murders or violence against, in particular, black men. In the script there wasn't a race or ethnicity attached to [main character] Ken Barber, he was just a down-and-out dad, in his 40s at a crossroads in his life with shut-in tendencies.

I thought it would be a very curious opportunity in terms of casting to add another layer of narrative about, at least in American culture, who we perceive as predator and prey and who gets to be afraid and who is feared.

In the US there's endless profiling of black men of all ages. There's that built-in fear and a very different protocol in terms of police activity and what their response is compared to situations with people of other races and different genders. It feels like there's a bias towards not just escalation but death. It's my thought that black men are very much in peril in this country the minute they walk out of the house. There's a question of whether or not they will come home, simply for the colour of their skin.

The films I've made all have leaned into fantastical stories or surreal visual storytelling, which has a lot to do with the fact that I never went to film school. I made films in art school but I was surrounded by painters, sculptors and photographers, people interested in abstraction to communicate. They were thinking about colour, texture, lines and heaviness or softness. So much of that visual narrative is part of every single film that I've made.

Geno Walker as Ken in Night's End, coming to the horror streaming service Shudder this week. Photo: Supplied.

I've always leaned into telling stories about girls and women because it's what I personally have experienced. There's so much content made for specifically young women that I would say doesn't quite get it right, so I feel like there will always be room for me to make films about these experiences. I want to present complicated female characters who might not even be likeable characters but I want my audience to still root for them and I want them all to have some sense of agency at the end.

There are a lot of women being recognised right now as writers and directors in the horror genre, all over the world. I don't think that feels like a trend or tokenistic or an anomaly. I think about Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein when she was a teenager. Women have been the subject of so many male-driven horror films that it feels like reclaiming territory that we've always been part of as subjects.

I know for a fact that there are so many women horror fans. Women get to know what fear means from an early age. I remember my mum saying to me constantly, "You can't walk home alone at night." Then we have this consistent relationship with blood from an early age too. I feel that makes us like, "Yeah, more blood." The production we're doing right now we've got vats, gallons and gallons, of blood being amassed in the production office.

* As told to Karl Puschmann

Night's End premieres on horror streaming service Shudder on March 31.