Nada (Doug Henderson) alone in a home recording booth creates chilling tales and morbid musings on life after death for his podcast, The Night Time World. But when a strange caller (Selina Flanscha) asserts she is a vampire, Nada must contend with testing his stories against a far darker truth. The four stories he tells on the podcast comprise the horror anthology The Night Time World, written and directed by Timothy Paul Lee Taylor, Brandon Lescrue, Sean Brien, Adam Michaels, Chaz Dray Schoenbeck, and Gene Blalock.
The Night Time World, even though it builds suspense and has thrilling moments, doesn’t have a clear guiding focus which mars its core message and overall experience.
The first scene includes a long excerpt from Nada’s podcast, which captures the essence and setup of the film but is executed without artistry in the camera movements. The choice of using a podcaster as the main character of the story, who is confined to the same room all night, is clearly problematic from the start. Filmmakers have done wonders with single-location films (Rear Window comes to mind), but the main storyline of The Night Time World feels repetitive far too quickly. There is no attempt at anything but close-ups of Nada and the camera he uses to record his episode. Some of his monitoring, his computer, and his sound equipment are included in the frame, but they are all quickly snapped back to him, and lower angles feel safe, yet unoriginal. Those are the angles that he is most often captured from.
But there is a welcome change once viewers are thrown into the first segment, which is by far the most entertaining and best-performed segment. It takes some time to develop the characters’ arcs, even employing great wit, which makes the scary moments hit harder. Following this, all entries plummet in quality, especially the writing and performance.
Coalescing every event in The Night Time World is the theme of everlasting life and instead of depicting the prospect of immortal days positively, the stories emphasize that it’s a curse. Nada’s fables explore the tormented existence of vampires within this context a set of vampire hunters looking to exterminate them a Gotham-esque vampire trying to control his bloodlust while rescuing his abducted lover a Black man falsely convicted of a cop’s murder.
Some of these contexts had the potential to convey timely messages about the state of the world, but their effect is muted by the inadequate script and visual effects. If writers and directors were able to at least come up with a decent script and screenplay, then other elements hampered by low budget such as visual effects would not be so prominent. Instead, the result is a poorly crafted story where fundamental filmmaking aspects become the focus.
The absence of suspense creates a problem not only for the different episodes in the anthology but also for the main narrative featuring Nada. While observing his interaction with the vampish caller, I kept wondering why he didn’t just cease the podcast instead of becoming a victim of her manipulations. Some stakes are provided that justify why he must remain tethered to the phone and continue recording, but those explanations do not make sense when balanced against the option of simply hanging up.
This, unfortunately, has an impact for the rest of the film. Although the final installment with the wrongfully imprisoned man did advance the story significantly more than the first two, the overall result is an emotionless, and logic-deficient, horror anthology. The Night Time World is yet another entry in an endless list of horror movies overflowing with promise, only to be blunted by poor writing, illogical reasoning, and no suspense.
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