The Redeemer: Son of Satan!

• Filmed on location in Staunton, Virginia — including the closed Staunton Military Academy and the Wright's Dairy Rite Drive-In — not a church in New Jersey.
• The film has circulated under three titles over the decades: The Redeemer, The Redeemer: Son of Satan!, and Class Reunion Massacre, the name slapped on its 1985 Continental Video VHS release.
• It premiered in Staunton, Virginia in 1978 and reached Los Angeles theaters and drive-ins that October — the same month John Carpenter's Halloween was hitting screens and reshaping the genre, not before it.
• The Redeemer: Son of Satan! is the only directing credit Constantine S. Gochis ever received; he never made another feature.

The Redeemer and Christopher, the silent boy who walks out of the lake, are the same entity swapping hosts — the film's own ending backs this, with the killer's gunshot wound and extra thumb visibly transferring to the boy in the final scene, suggesting one consciousness cycling between the preacher persona and the child rather than a single killer acting alone.

The killings play like a twisted Passion play: a preacher's hate-sermon about sinners staged as the literal script for six vice-specific murders (the lawyer, the party girl, the glutton, the heiress, the actor, the closeted lesbian), with each victim cast in a morality pageant they never agreed to star in.

The reunion invitations are less an invite than an indictment — the sins recited in the opening sermon read like a docket, not commentary, and the film ends with a new boy walking out of the same lake, hinting the judgment doesn't end with this class, just changes venues.

Ten years after graduating from the now-shuttered Stuart Morse Academy, six former classmates get reunion invitations they never asked for — and a stranger calling himself the Redeemer has already picked out the punishment to fit each of their sins. A corrupt lawyer, a party girl, a gluttonous slacker, a wealthy heiress, a vain actor and a closeted, self-loathing lesbian find themselves trapped on the old school grounds while a fire-and-brimstone preacher works a sermon about sinners into a body count. The "priest" running the show turns out to be the killer himself — and he's tied, in ways the film never fully explains, to a strange, silent boy who wanders out of a nearby lake at the start of the movie and walks back into it at the end, wound and all, like the whole massacre was just one host swapping for another.