Kristin's Bookshelf

📖 #VanDeath
✍️ Brian Asman
🎙️ Joe Hempel & Zura Johnson
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This was made for the big screen. RV road trip horror, escalating tension, and a second half that absolutely takes off.

#VanDeath gave me major “Joy Ride” vibes, the 2001 Paul Walker and Steve Zahn movie, but swap the big rig and car for RVs. The first half is largely devoted to character development and building tension, but once their RV comes under full attack, the story hits the gas and doesn’t let up.

That’s when the true horror comes out to play. Victims start piling up while Jasper and Morgan are simultaneously discovering what they’ve been hiding from each other. The flashbacks occasionally pulled me out of the tension, especially once the action picked up, but I appreciated the additional context they provided.

The entire second half had me on the edge of my seat. Chaotic, tense, cinematic, and exactly the kind of horror story I could picture watching in a theater. Definitely one I’ll be recommending!

Narration: Joe Hempel took a little while to pull me in, but once the action intensified, so did his performance. I loved him in “The Intruder,” and here he really captured Jasper’s panic, fear, and determination to fight for the woman he loves. Zura Johnson has an incredible voice and delivered a phenomenal performance, though I struggled at times with a slight fuzziness in the audio quality that made her sections less clear to my sensitive ears.