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Night Trap
When a group of college kids rent a lake house for the weekend, they're hoping for some relaxation and fun. Instead, they find an inescapable death trap! From one of the most critically acclaimed horror writers in comics comes a chilling tribute to the genre's most memorable slasher classics!
129 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 12, 2013
27 people want to read
About the author
Cullen Bunn
2,101 books1,061 followersCullen grew up in rural North Carolina, but now lives in the St. Louis area with his wife Cindy and his son Jackson. His noir/horror comic (and first collaboration with Brian Hurtt), The Damned, was published in 2007 by Oni Press. The follow-up, The Damned: Prodigal Sons, was released in 2008. In addition to The Sixth Gun, his current projects include Crooked Hills, a middle reader horror prose series from Evileye Books; The Tooth, an original graphic novel from Oni Press; and various work for Marvel and DC. Somewhere along the way, Cullen founded Undaunted Press and edited the critically acclaimed small press horror magazine, Whispers from the Shattered Forum.
All writers must pay their dues, and Cullen has worked various odd jobs, including Alien Autopsy Specialist, Rodeo Clown, Professional Wrestler Manager, and Sasquatch Wrangler.
And, yes, he has fought for his life against mountain lions and he did perform on stage as the World's Youngest Hypnotist. Buy him a drink sometime, and he'll tell you all about it.
Visit his website at www.cullenbunn.com.
All writers must pay their dues, and Cullen has worked various odd jobs, including Alien Autopsy Specialist, Rodeo Clown, Professional Wrestler Manager, and Sasquatch Wrangler.
And, yes, he has fought for his life against mountain lions and he did perform on stage as the World's Youngest Hypnotist. Buy him a drink sometime, and he'll tell you all about it.
Visit his website at www.cullenbunn.com.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 7, 2019
Hm... not my favorite of Cullen's, not my least favorite. It definitely plays really heavily into the 80s teen slasher camp style, and some of the death scenes were pretty imaginative and fun. Graphic novels are usually quick reads anyways, but this has to be one of the fastest I've read through! It might've stood a chance at 3.5 or even 4 stars if the epilogue hadn't been so out of left field and irrelevant, but what can you do?
Content warnings for murder, gore, etc.
Content warnings for murder, gore, etc.
September 12, 2018
Cullen Bunn presents us with a straight up 80's slasher flick. There's nothing much new or original here, but if you like your teenagers trapped in a cabin story, you'll probably enjoy this.
November 18, 2020
I don't have much to say. It's pretty straightforward slasher stuff.
So what I'll say is why I think the plot of Friday the 13th, the proto-slasher(?) is really dumb.
If you’ve heard of this, you’ve no doubt heard that Jason isn’t the killer, but Jason’s mom. If you haven't, then this probably isn't information that matters to you at this point.
This whole mom thing doesn’t work. Because we don’t even SEE Jason’s mom until the last half hour of the movie. So the whole time you’re wondering who the killer is...and it’s a character you didn’t even know existed. So it's not like you could say, "You know what? I bet it was that middle-aged woman!" That wasnt even a selectable option until it was a foregone conclusion.
We miss a lot in this movie compared to the contemporary Halloween. In Halloween, we see the killer fully way before the action really starts. It works. It builds tension, and we see that Michael Myers or The Shape is formidable. In Friday, we don’t get to see the killer, we see most of the kills from either a first-person of the killer perspective or with the killer completely absent.
Characters recognize Pam Voorhees before they're killed, which makes us think the killer is someone we know, but it ends up being someone THEY know, but we don’t. It's a cheat, at best.
This movie is one of the OG slashers, so the rules weren’t clear yet. But it’s definitely a storytelling rule that if you’re going to put a mystery out there, if the true perpetrator turns out to be an unknown, it’s just not going to work. It’s a little bit of a fuck you to the viewer. The way this works out best, the viewer would get some clues as to who’s doing the shit, but they wouldn’t all know who it was before the reveal. So in retrospect, you’d look back and say, “Oh, that makes sense!” With Friday the 13th, that’s not possible because you don’t even know about what happened to Jason, let alone about his mom, until Pam Vorhees shows up 40 minutes before the ending.
Anyway, a little more plotting would've helped a lot. And I can totally forgive this early entry into the genre, but I think some newer movies could learn from the past and raise the bar a little.
So what I'll say is why I think the plot of Friday the 13th, the proto-slasher(?) is really dumb.
If you’ve heard of this, you’ve no doubt heard that Jason isn’t the killer, but Jason’s mom. If you haven't, then this probably isn't information that matters to you at this point.
This whole mom thing doesn’t work. Because we don’t even SEE Jason’s mom until the last half hour of the movie. So the whole time you’re wondering who the killer is...and it’s a character you didn’t even know existed. So it's not like you could say, "You know what? I bet it was that middle-aged woman!" That wasnt even a selectable option until it was a foregone conclusion.
We miss a lot in this movie compared to the contemporary Halloween. In Halloween, we see the killer fully way before the action really starts. It works. It builds tension, and we see that Michael Myers or The Shape is formidable. In Friday, we don’t get to see the killer, we see most of the kills from either a first-person of the killer perspective or with the killer completely absent.
Characters recognize Pam Voorhees before they're killed, which makes us think the killer is someone we know, but it ends up being someone THEY know, but we don’t. It's a cheat, at best.
This movie is one of the OG slashers, so the rules weren’t clear yet. But it’s definitely a storytelling rule that if you’re going to put a mystery out there, if the true perpetrator turns out to be an unknown, it’s just not going to work. It’s a little bit of a fuck you to the viewer. The way this works out best, the viewer would get some clues as to who’s doing the shit, but they wouldn’t all know who it was before the reveal. So in retrospect, you’d look back and say, “Oh, that makes sense!” With Friday the 13th, that’s not possible because you don’t even know about what happened to Jason, let alone about his mom, until Pam Vorhees shows up 40 minutes before the ending.
Anyway, a little more plotting would've helped a lot. And I can totally forgive this early entry into the genre, but I think some newer movies could learn from the past and raise the bar a little.
March 6, 2015
This was very short, but I liked the images and I will continue with the series.
Read
September 17, 2025It’s… fine I guess if all you want is a slasher told with minimal exposition. Characters are pure archetypes, with them all bleeding into one another; according to the plot summary, the killer here is The Trapper, the most wanted man in America but the actual antagonists are a family of killers, and I don’t think any of them are called The Trapper. Hell, I can’t remember almost any of the character names and I finished the book five minutes ago.
The pacing is also erratic. I appreciate it gets into the action within the first chapter, but it also really could have used some down time to build up the cast or make you root for them. The most a character gets is the flashbacks for the woman dressed like Sexy Velma, in the form of flashbacks to a previous slasher incident she was involved with, but like many parts of this, it feels half baked. The rest of the cast are simple caricatures, gestures at a fully formed personality that’s just a mask to hide an empty shell.
It would help if the gore was nastier; some of the kills are quite brutal, including one involving acid in a shower, and one involving one of the traps the killer sets up, but I was left underwhelmed by most of them. For instance, the first kill is Jeff and homeboy gets a weird spike rammed through his head. We see his eye fly out but there’s almost no detail or anything. One of the benefits of telling a slasher story in comic form is you can really get nasty with the details, but this comic is really hit or miss with that.
The art is also inconsistent. It mostly looks fine, if a bit too “clean” for this type of story, but I spotted a few continuity errors that felt pretty obvious, not the least of which when a character who was previously stabbed in the dead center of their chest is later shown to have no chest wound. This is on top of the fact that, despite the cool costumes shown in the snuff films the characters made, the design of them are just woods people wearing regular clothes. There’s no iconic look to them, which feels like a missed opportunity.
It really feels like this should have been longer. There are vague themes and back stories that feel really underwritten to the point that I wonder if this was originally a movie script that got turned into a comic and removed anything that wasn’t forward moving action. It’s not the worst thing I’ve read, but it is rather unremarkable and I can’t say I’d recommend it very enthusiastically.
The pacing is also erratic. I appreciate it gets into the action within the first chapter, but it also really could have used some down time to build up the cast or make you root for them. The most a character gets is the flashbacks for the woman dressed like Sexy Velma, in the form of flashbacks to a previous slasher incident she was involved with, but like many parts of this, it feels half baked. The rest of the cast are simple caricatures, gestures at a fully formed personality that’s just a mask to hide an empty shell.
It would help if the gore was nastier; some of the kills are quite brutal, including one involving acid in a shower, and one involving one of the traps the killer sets up, but I was left underwhelmed by most of them. For instance, the first kill is Jeff and homeboy gets a weird spike rammed through his head. We see his eye fly out but there’s almost no detail or anything. One of the benefits of telling a slasher story in comic form is you can really get nasty with the details, but this comic is really hit or miss with that.
The art is also inconsistent. It mostly looks fine, if a bit too “clean” for this type of story, but I spotted a few continuity errors that felt pretty obvious, not the least of which when a character who was previously stabbed in the dead center of their chest is later shown to have no chest wound. This is on top of the fact that, despite the cool costumes shown in the snuff films the characters made, the design of them are just woods people wearing regular clothes. There’s no iconic look to them, which feels like a missed opportunity.
It really feels like this should have been longer. There are vague themes and back stories that feel really underwritten to the point that I wonder if this was originally a movie script that got turned into a comic and removed anything that wasn’t forward moving action. It’s not the worst thing I’ve read, but it is rather unremarkable and I can’t say I’d recommend it very enthusiastically.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 21, 2017
One of the big draws for Cullen Bunn's writing is that it takes some very conventional genre conventions and plays around with them. Helheim is probably the most extreme there, but Harrow County and Sixth Gun also do things with their respective settings that I don't see almost anywhere else.
That's why Night Trap comes as such a disappointment. I though Bunn could really bring something interesting to a space thoroughly dominated by formula. It's not like there's no precedent, the comic Nailbiter gets a lot of mileage out of playing with the notions of slashers, and movies like The Final Girls and Cabin in the Woods did interesting things in the movie space.
But barring a few novelties, this graphic novel is just a slasher horror story. A bunch of poorly characterized teenagers get murdered in an isolated house. Though there are a few interesting moments that suggest that one of the characters had been through this before, it never leads to anything particularly meaningful.
But I can at least comfort myself with the fact that there's a perfectly good alternative to get horror written by Bunn: Harrow County continues to be one of the best ongoing horror comics out there.
That's why Night Trap comes as such a disappointment. I though Bunn could really bring something interesting to a space thoroughly dominated by formula. It's not like there's no precedent, the comic Nailbiter gets a lot of mileage out of playing with the notions of slashers, and movies like The Final Girls and Cabin in the Woods did interesting things in the movie space.
But barring a few novelties, this graphic novel is just a slasher horror story. A bunch of poorly characterized teenagers get murdered in an isolated house. Though there are a few interesting moments that suggest that one of the characters had been through this before, it never leads to anything particularly meaningful.
But I can at least comfort myself with the fact that there's a perfectly good alternative to get horror written by Bunn: Harrow County continues to be one of the best ongoing horror comics out there.
November 16, 2021
This thing reads insanely fast.
It’s your run-of-the-mill crazy rednecks meet camping teens story. It isn’t doing anything new, but sometimes folks are just looking for the tried and true formula.
The epilogue was just a short based on the Night Trap game. Kind of non-sequitur.
It was aright. Wish I would have read it in October though 😊
It’s your run-of-the-mill crazy rednecks meet camping teens story. It isn’t doing anything new, but sometimes folks are just looking for the tried and true formula.
The epilogue was just a short based on the Night Trap game. Kind of non-sequitur.
It was aright. Wish I would have read it in October though 😊
February 25, 2024
Not my kind of horror book, all gore and no lore! It was just a splatter fest of gore art, and combined with a weak, almost non-existent story and characters, it failed to make an impact on me. It was excessive in gore with no real sense of threat or thrills. I honestly didn't care about anyone in this book. Disappointing.
March 5, 2021
Wow! This was like reading a campy horror movie. Curvy college girls rent a desolate cabin in the woods and are stalked by homicidal maniacs! Pretty much every trope was present and plenty of gore. If you're into that, you might like this. If none of this sounded up your alley, skip it.
May 12, 2019
It's pulpy in an almost silly way.
February 21, 2018
After reading the most excellent THE SIXTH GUN series, and the Horror-tastic HARROW COUNTY, I thought Cullen Bunn could do no wrong; but I was wrong. *sad face*
April 19, 2021
There are very few things I love more than a good (or at least fun) slasher movie, so Cullen Bunn's Night Trap was right up my alley. A bunch of friends gather at a remote cabin for a weekend of fun and relaxation but a family of psychos quickly begins picking them off. Slasher fans will eat this one up and probably also catch some neat references to fan favorite films (also was it just me or were there a couple of hat tips to Supernatural fans too?). This one's recommended.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews