Movie Review: He Drives at Night (2019)

He Drives at Night is an independent horror film written and directed by Chuck Chapman. It actually didn’t say on IMDB who wrote it, but since Chapman directed and starred in it, we are going to go out on a limb and say he wrote it.

Chapman plays the lead role of Hal, who is the writer of a crime book that had been released a couple of years prior to this story and is being taunted relentlessly by a person only known as the Chaos Killer who enjoyed the book a little too much. The killer calls Hal on a flip phone using a voice changer to make his voice very deep. He gives Hal orders and also sends him videos of himself killing people. He wants Hal to now write a book about his own Chaos Killer experiences.

Hal is narrating the story as you watch it, and is in constant communication with the killer. The killer calls him non-stop throughout the film. Sometimes to taunt him, and sometimes making jokes, but mostly to talk about his killings. Hal seems to also be under surveillance from the killer as the killer seems to know his every move and has been following him around. As the killer stack up the body count, Hal tries to figure out who the killer is.

This film is about as low-budget as it gets. It had an IndieGoGo campaign that raised just over $2300. It has a lot of very cheesy practical effects for the gore, which we liked, and although the overall quality was bad, we think they did a decent job with what they had to work with production-wise. The acting wasn’t that great, but most of the film was either Hal going from place to place narrating, or him on the phone with the killer and a cut-scene where someone is getting killed along the way.

Overall, we really enjoyed He Drives at Night. It was super cheesy and more of a horror/suspense film, but with the resources available we think they did a good job which is more than we can say for some Hollywood films. It has a lot of charm packed in there for a film on a $2300 budget. It was written pretty well, and it had a nice amount of practical effect gore peppered throughout as the killer went on his bloody mission making content for the book he wanted Hal to write for him. It also has a pretty awesome and creepy version of an old folk song called “The Old Woman and the Pig” in there which we really liked.

He Drives at Night releases on October 10th and we would definitely recommend it to all of you indie-horror enthusiasts out there.