Directed by Samuel Gonzalez Jr. and Matthew Hersh with writing from Gonzalez Jr. and Gigi Gustin, Night of the Missing is an unnerving anthology entry now available to stream on Screambox. While other anthology features like Creepshow and V/H/S connect their stories via media, in their cases comics and video tapes respectively, our stories are strung together and connected by a board of missing persons posters. Opening with strong imagery, we see a bloody squad car that takes us away into opening credits, where we enter with a powerful zoom shot on a police station weathering a stormy Christmas Eve. As the evening custodian leaves the cell block, he comes upon a woman (Jill Awbrey), hands dripping with blood, sobbing for the sheriff. The sheriff (Meredith Thomas) arrives to deal with the woman and dismisses the janitor home for the evening, after his shock at seeing the stranger.
The Woman, initially, is not overly talkative, appears shocked, and drenched to the bone with no makeup or jewelry, not even shoes. The Woman finally utters that she’s there to report a missing person, suddenly standing and beginning to survey the wall of missing posters. “So many,” she notes, have just vanished. The sheriff continues to scribble away, coldly saying that hundreds of thousands of people go missing every year. But The Woman stops on the image of a child, Joey Gonzalez, causing the sheriff to snap her pencil; The Woman continues saying she can still hear the echoes of the past, loose change and music jingling as she imagines the boy’s final moments… leading us right into Joey’s freezer.
Young Joey (Joseph Jojo Martinez) wants dessert, and despite his mother’s dismissal, is caught hands deep in the candy jar when a television showing a creepy clown ice cream truck boots to life, inviting him in. He turns off the cartoon but the jingle continues, and then, parked right outside Joey’s front door is a singing, happy little ice cream truck. With all the treats lit up but no one appearing to be inside, is Joey the one looking for treats, or is he the apple of someone else’s eye?
We are then back at the police station where a sceptical sheriff doubts The Woman’s knowledge, but Joey was only the beginning. Ignoring the sheriff’s requests of who she’s there to report, the woman moves to a photo of Tammy Wright (Gigi Gustin) who supposedly took a phone call she would come to regret. Tammy looks like a happy go lucky twentysomething jamming to tunes and cleaning her place one evening. It appears Tammy is not alone in her home though, and is oblivious due to the music, stopping it only when she feels a creeping up her spine. She listens to a message begging her to come home, if she can hear it; it’s her mother, whom she bids goodnight when the message is done playing. A well-loved happy girl, with her lights flickering menacingly, we can only imagine the forces at play that could pull her spirit away without a trace.
With Tammy’s story told, we revisit the sheriff and The Woman, who turns again to another poster, Lila Cameron (Jenna Kanell), and we are whisked into classical music being played by a custodian. Hearing cries for help over the music, he leaves his work and finds the screaming is coming from a model train set in the middle of the other room. Two women, both miniature in stature are struggling along the road, carrying gasoline. Eyed by stiff-moving models that populate the set, one woman succumbs to her injuries and passes away, but Lila carries on, dumping gas on the toy town as she crawls along in bare feet. You’ll have to watch and see how these little women came to be, and how they came to be forgotten…
And with one last missing poster, we meet Will Rainier (Justin Miles), the man who had true love. Sat in front of a Ouija board, his ankle monitor beeping away, is Will, trying to contact a passed loved one, a woman, glimpsed from a photograph. Lost love, lost freedom, and now a lost man. This is where I’ll leave the story.
The missing posters are a clever and effective device to keep the already fast-paced and condensed tale moving at breakneck speed. Four perfectly creepy, sad or mysterious tales are packed into the overarching tale of the sheriff’s office, and I would call them all intriguing. The most frightening, in my opinion, is certainly the entry “We All Scream” with little Joey Gonzalez, offering chilling effects and lighting to create a simple but creepy story. The portion “Miniature” featuring Terrifier and Renfield’s Jenna Kanell is an interesting feature that had me thinking about how’s and why’s, and I loved the camera work that pushed and pulled, back and forth, between a small, disturbing, false suburban world and our own imperfectly large one. The cast is overall quite strong and features some names you’ll recognize and some convincing performances. No two stories track the same way so each entry is special, providing us all the possibilities and nightmare fuel the film can to explain the impossible phenomenon of missing people, simply vanished.
The sheriff and The Woman do their part in creating the vessel that holds all of the stories, keeping us invested and hurrying us along to our conclusion. But I can’t say some of you won’t be disappointed at the ending, potentially. With so much revealed and so many secrets laid bare, it was a shame that it all seemed to end so abruptly. Regardless, the journey is the destination and I enjoyed being shown my way through the halls of the many missing and the terrifying or curious stories of how they came to disappear. This compact thriller is streaming now for your easy viewing pleasure with many a fascinating story and no excess fat. A lean treat with plenty to follow, watch this on Screambox now.
