Horror Movie About Working Night Shift Will Scar You For Life, Stream Without Netflix

If you’re looking for a tense slasher in a tight setting, Open 24 Hours will satisfy your cravings like one of those spinning convenience store hotdogs sitting under the heat lamp after a long day on the road.

Through the use of well-paced escalation, questionable hallucinations on Mary’s part, and the comings and goings of various interesting yet suspicious characters, Open 24 Hours first makes you question Mary’s sanity, shows you enough to make you understand that her life is truly in danger, but still has you question what’s real by the time it approaches its third act.

At the film’s outset, Open 24 Hours tells us enough of what we need to know about Mary. Having recently been released from prison, Mary is followed by her parole officer, Tom, who wants to make sure she stays on the straight and narrow.

Mary is also plagued by hallucinations brought on by the kind of trauma one would experience when they find out that their boyfriend is actually the “Rain Ripper,” a now-incarcerated serial killer who claimed the lives of 35 victims.

Doing her best to course-correct and put her past traumas behind her in Open 24 Hours, Mary gets a job at the Deer Gas Market under Tom’s guidance. Mary quickly learns the ropes on her first night but is triggered by the rainstorm outside because James used to stalk and murder his victims while singing “Raindrops” by Dee Clark. Before Mary set James on fire, she was forced to watch him carry out his final murders before finally deciding to set him on fire, which ultimately led to his imprisonment.

Open 24 Hours gets confusing because of Mary’s hallucinations, which at first make the viewer question her grip on reality. When Tom shows up to inform Mary that James escaped from prison, it becomes clear that she’s at risk. But given how many graphic visions Mary’s had before knowing about James’ escape, it’s hard to tell what’s actually real, and what’s simply a figment of her imagination.

While watching Open 24 Hours, I found myself constantly changing my mind about Mary. She’s clearly (and justifiably) paranoid, but she was also an unwilling accessory to James before she worked up the courage to get out of the relationship, which is why the townsfolk refer to her as “The Watcher.”

Though she has vivid and violent hallucinations that will probably haunt her for the rest of her days, she’s shown doing her due dilligence in the form of taking her medications and reminding herself what’s real and what’s not. In other words, Mary’s perception is unreliable, but she’s at least making an earnest attempt to stay lucid.

REVIEW SCORE

I’m not quite sure why Open 24 Hours has only a 45 percent critical score against a 35 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. I often go out of my way to watch terrible movies because I get a sick thrill from it, but I can’t say that there’s anything about this movie that rubbed me the wrong way.

The complex range of emotions that Vanessa Grasse (Leatherface) explores in this film are second-to-none, and I’ll be keeping an eye on her moving forward because I have a feeling she’ll continue to do great things in the horror genre.

I was thoroughly impressed with Open 24 Hours, and I’ll definitely be making my friends watch it on our next horror night. If you want to watch a truly disturbing film about working the night shift in the middle of nowhere, you can watch Open 24 Hours for free on Tubi.