.png){kind=logo}
Image via RLJE Films and Shudder
Luna Guthrie is a Movie Features Editor for Collider, writer and film critic. She began as a writer for Collider in 2021 and joined the editorial team in 2024. She has a bachelor's degree in Humanities and Creative Writing.
Luna is a lifelong film geek and horror fan with a love of anything 1970s, especially in film - the grainier, the better!
When not watching movies or reading and writing about them, Luna loves making clothes from vintage patterns, going to the theater, reading the memoirs of interesting people and attending horror conventions. She would have been a hanger-on of the LA glam rock scene, but since she was born forty years too late, she settled for writing.
Sign in to your Collider account
Last year, Ryan Coogler's Sinners was the talk of the town, not only in terms of great filmmaking, but in terms of what could be made of the vampire on screen. Bloodsuckers prove to be a versatile and endlessly interesting figure in the horror genre, having enjoyed numerous nuanced incarnations over the years, with Coogler's musical approach offering something new for a creature that has dominated fiction for centuries. And now comes Ryan Prows' Night Patrol, a horror movie so stylish, surprising, and terrifyingly relevant to the world we are living in today, that it surely must go down in the annals of great vampire cinema in years to come. Following the woefully overlooked Low Life, Prows teams up with a number of his former collaborators to continue to dissect the U.S.'s social and legal landscape through a horror lens.
What Is 'Night Patrol' About?
Wazi (RJ Cyler), a young Crip, is enjoying a rendezvous with a Blood girl on the outskirts of town when they are intercepted by Night Patrol, a militant faction of the LAPD ostensibly operating as a gang task force, who gun down the young woman but leave him alive. His brother Xavier (Jermaine Fowler) has worked his way up from a gang to law enforcement and is envious of his colleague Ethan (Justin Long) for being the latest recruit to Night Patrol. Although an immense abuse of power is evident on the part of the task force, the Bloods, and Wazi's own mother, Ayanda (Nicki Micheaux), are certain that there is something more ominous going on, that some evil mystical force is exacerbating existing turf and race wars on the streets of LA. Ayanda is deep in her Zulu heritage and its cultural practices and superstitions, and toughened as she may be by her environment, she knows it is this heritage that will prove their greatest power when the time comes.
Like all the best modern vampire films, the supernatural elements of Night Patrol creep in slowly and are immersed in a very real world that is recognizable to the audience, allowing for a certain suspension of disbelief. Prows establishes LA as a grimy, tough, crime-ridden place and taps into decades-long power struggles between different factions of its population as a backdrop to the horror elements. It may not have the obvious sophistication of Sinners, and in fact leans closer to the wit and visual style of From Dusk Till Dawn, but Night Patrol has a lot of interesting ideas running through its veins.
'Night Patrol' Is Rich in Themes and Ideas
What is immediately evident about the movie is just how pertinent Night Patrol is today, and the filmmakers couldn't possibly have known just how relevant this movie would be to its audience by the time it released. The U.S. is in the grip of some of the most hellish times in living memory, with ICE committing terrible crimes against people and actively violating their rights. Just this last week, an innocent woman was murdered by a group masquerading as law enforcement, and such a figure is the central antagonist of Night Patrol. In Night Patrol, these renegade cops cruise the streets at night, gunning down citizens just going about their lives, and you can't help but notice that their targets are all Black. Such is the threat that the Crips and Bloods end up agreeing that their own rivalry is dwarfed by the threat of this squad, and that it is in their mutual interest to put aside their own differences to fight the bigger enemy.
The movie is rich with thematic narratives and imagery. The police antagonists are a white gang, exclusively targeting Black victims, with all the hatred and backwards ideas about supremacy that tend to go along with such vitriol, and their otherworldly reasons for targeting the people they do are reflective of real-world racial tensions. Our leading cop duo — one Black and one white — are both the sons of cops, and, it turns out, they share a deeper, more startling genetic link, one that is supposed to guide their destinies no matter how hard they try to resist. At the center of this violent universe is the mother figure, Ayanda, played with ferocious determination by Micheaux, who bridges the modern world in the projects of LA and the mystical African world that nobody believes in the power of. Of course, when it becomes evident that vampires are on a murder spree, the survivors are willing to believe just about anything is possible. Themes of heredity, racial supremacy, and bucking social and familial expectations run deep in this vampire story.
'Night Patrol' Is Visually Stylish and Gritty
Image via IFC FilmsThere is a gloriously '90s feel to Night Patrol, with a visual grain that makes you feel like you're watching it on VHS, and, but for the odd mention of modern technology like body cameras, you could imagine the story taking place anywhere between the early '90s and 2026. Prows employs a harsh, desert-like, sun-bleached lighting and color palette that make his world feel dry, dusty, and practically dead itself, while an eclectic score swings evocatively between aggressive hip-hop and otherworldly, Wendy Carlos-inspired synth. The narrative unfolds with precision, starting as a crime thriller that may or may not be taking place in a dystopian version of LA, and gradually laying its cards on the table one by one, until it fully breaches horror territory. When it gets there, it maintains the subtlest inkling of wit that emphasizes the absurdity of the situation in the real world, without ever overplaying it and spoiling the atmosphere it has so carefully constructed.
If I were an actor, I would kill to have a resume like that of Justin Long. A bona fide scream king with one of the most interesting movie careers of his generation, he has a real knack for attaching himself to outlandish, surprising, and confronting projects. His role as the somewhat corrupted yet somewhat redeemable cop is welcome on the heels of his too-brief turn in last year's Weapons, the fabulous Barbarian, and even the questionable Goosebumps reboot. Even when the projects aren't the hits they could be, he brings so much to them, and he is never content to just play the dad to the young leads in one rom-com after another. It would have been easy for a lesser actor to be drowned out by the intense talent on display here from the likes of Fowler, Cyler, and the wider ensemble, but as always, he makes his mark and is evidently having a ton of fun while doing so. With its depth, style, and surprisingly outlandish ending, Night Patrol is the latest feather in Long's mightily-quilled cap.
Night Patrol comes to theaters on January 16.
Release Date January 16, 2026
Runtime 104 minutes
Director Ryan Prows
Writers Tim Cairo, Jake Gibson, Ryan Prows, Shaye Ogbonna
Producers David S. Goyer, James Harris, Matthew Helderman, Mark Lane, Luke Taylor, Narineh Hacopian, Keith Levine, Maxime Cottray, Grady Craig
Pros & Cons
- Strong, emotionally evocative performances from the whole cast, with Nicki Marcheaux and RJ Cyler as standouts.
- Visually stylish and compelling direction from Ryan Prows.
- A fresh and very modern take on vampire horror.
English (US) ·