Past Misdeeds: The Midnight Hour (1985)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

It's Halloween in a small, quiet town in New England. A group of teenagers (Lee Montgomery, Shari Belafonte, LeVar Burton, Peter DeLuise and Dedee Pfeiffer) think it's a good idea to steal (or "borrow" as they call it) some paraphernalia belonging to a historical local witch and the witch hunter who killed her (both of course represented by a descendant among the group) from a museum, and fart around on the cemetery with the stuff afterwards. Said farting around includes unsealing a sealed scroll and reading a ritual to wake up the dead and all manner of demons.

This being a horror film, the ritual turns out to be a Very Bad Idea, and soon the town is filled with various walking dead (not all of them aggressive), a few werewolves, and the town's original witch Lucinda (Jonelle Allen) who is now a vampire. Fortunately, 50s cheerleader Sandy (Jonna Lee) is among the friendlier (and rather lively looking) undead. Initially, she just uses her new undeath to romance (or really seduce in a friendly manner) ultra-straight witch hunter descendent Phil (Lee Montgomery's character), but also turns out to have useful knowledge when it comes to curse-breaking and monster-fighting (the film only vaguely suggesting why, so we can assume she was the Slayer when she was still alive). Which makes her quite the girl to romance for a witch hunter descendent in dire need of witch hunting skills.

Generally, it's a good idea to keep away from US TV movies from the 80s, because where the 70s saw American TV movies with often surprising degrees of cleverness and talent involved, 80s TV movies more often than not took large steps back into the realm of the safe and the boring while keeping all the budgetary problems the older films had.

Fortunately, there are exceptions to all rules, and such an exception Jack Bender's ABC movie The Midnight Hour turns out to be. In fact, The Midnight Hour is not just a watchable TV production but a film that achieves what it sets out to do quite perfectly. Namely, it is one of the most fun, partly comedic, attempts at turning the love of classic four colour horror (that never actually existed in this idealized form, of course) into a film that not just pays homage to the sweeter and more good-natured types of horror but also should work well enough for an audience that has never heard of this sort of thing.

This being a TV movie, the film's humour as well as its violence are on an all ages level, shooting for, and mostly arriving at, the point that won't actually disturb (most) children but that won't look too harmless to grown-ups. It is, I think, a very difficult tone to get right, yet Bender not only hits it, but really does make it look effortless, balancing the silliness of the simple monster costumes and the need to kill characters without getting to enthusiastic about the blood with the need to provide actual excitement in a rather masterful way for most of the film. The film only flounders a bit with the included musical number, and the group of undead in the finale, when the inherent silliness of the material just overwhelms other concerns, but it's never so bad to ruin or even just damage the experience. [Future me has actually come round to the musical number.]

Bender also manages to not make his film look like a TV production at all. Sure, there aren't exactly many locations and sets, but the ones that are there are shot with an amount of imagination and colour you generally just don't find in TV productions of the time. There's nothing cardboard or bland about the film and its look, and it is much more of a joy to look at then anyone could have expected. In some well-placed scenes Bender also reaches for and touches the dream-like heart of horror, a feeling of the surreal and the grotesque US horror cinema's interest has always been rather spotty in, and that was often left to us Europeans to try to achieve in films. Like everything else in it, The Midnight Hour makes reaching this, for me the most exalted state in the cinema of the fantastic, look easy and natural.

It's impossible for me – and I suspect for a lot of people - to watch something like The Midnight Hour and not assume a deep and abiding love for the horror genre in its director, as well as its writer William Bleich, for it seems to so perfectly encapsulate a lot of things I love about the less disturbing parts of the genre that aren't often in fashion. The Midnight Hour does know about darker undercurrents to its material and doesn't shy away from it, it just doesn't put much emphasis on them. Consequently there is an air of nostalgia surrounding the film, the more rarefied, romantic kind of nostalgia which suggests a film that knows very well it isn't actually nostalgic for the past as it was, but dreaming of an idealized picture of a past that never was. At the same time, The Midnight Hour is also a film more than willing to change things it doesn't like about the past it idealizes, so it includes more than one person of colour, features a long dead girl as its secret hero, and doesn't seem to think that being different and being evil are the same thing. In fact, it doesn't even think being undead and being evil are the same thing, and some of the film's best gags are based on the living dead acting like the living.


That The Midnight Hour manages all this while at the same time just being a horror film to watch with one's family where everyone involved can have fun is just the dressing on a delicious Halloween cake with spiders.