Night Patrol With Justin Long & CM Punk Brings Fresh Twist to Vampire Cop Genre

Professional wrestling icon CM Punk and actor Justin Long are teaming up for an unconventional horror thriller that puts a fresh spin on the vampire cop genre.

via: CBM

Following a positive reception from festival screenings at this year's Fantastic Fest, Beyond Fest and more, Night Patrol is heading to theaters on January 6, and the first trailer for the vampire cop thriller is now online.

Directed by Lowlife and V/H/S/94 filmmaker Ryan Prows, who also penned the script with Shaye Ogbonna, Tim Cairo, and Jake Gibson, the movie stars Justin Long (Barbarian, Coyotes), Jermaine Fowler (The Blackening, Sting) and current WWE World Heavyweight Champion CM Punk (The Girl of the Third Floor, Rabid), and focuses on an LAPD office who discovers that some of his fellow cops only patrol the streets at nighttime for a very good reason.

Prows said of the project: “I am thrilled that we’re partnering with RLJE and Shudder to bring Night Patrol to theaters. It’s been a long road to get here, and we couldn’t have asked for a better team to help push this fun, rollercoaster of a film out into the world. I’m beyond excited we get to blast our wild film far and wide to a hungry, unsuspecting audience.”

While speaking to The Direct in a recent interview, Prows also spoke about the movie's deeper themes of police corruption and violence, and whether he'd simply rather audiences view Night Patrol as a fun vampire flick.

"Our initial goal was like, let's make a movie where the heroes, quote, unquote heroes of it are like, from people in a community that never get spotlighted. They're never the hero of these movies. And then, yeah, the moral ambiguity of that is like bringing the humanity to it and bringing the character to it, and RJ and Jermaine Fowler and Justin Long, like digging into these really sort of multi-sided, multi-faceted characters."

"The fun of vampire movies, of the horror genre in general, is just like, make a thrill ride with it. And then, obviously, there are a lot of, like, you said, everything going on today, this touches on that. If you want to dive into that, and the thematics of all that [is] there, but you know, the other side of it, just the surface level fun and popcorn sort of thrill ride of it is there too. So that was from the jump. The design of it is to be thrilling and fun, and say something and everything in between."

Check out the new trailer below.

*****

When I first watched this trailer a few days ago I was confused as to why Shudder was getting behind a movie that in the first few minutes reminded me of the Jake Gyllenhaal/Michael Pena movie End of Watch. Shudder is in the business of horror not police dramas.

Then as I continued to watch the horror started to creep in. After watching the trailer I'm definitely looking forward to catching this in theaters.

Here's hoping the film follows more in the vein of Get Out regarding it's social commentary, and not in the direction of The Purge, which social themes always had potential, but was poor on it's execution regarding it's social commentary.