The Scare Salon

Directed by Jack Bender (who would later go on to helm episodes of Lost, The Sopranos, and Game of Thrones), The Midnight Hour is heavy on the comedy and musical numbers, and light on the horror, though there are several deaths and resurrections, and a passably spooky atmosphere with lots of foggy graveyard shots. The movie has a small cult following nowadays and got a DVD release back in 2000, but as far as I can tell has since gone out of print and isn’t available to (legally) stream anywhere, which is kind of a shame.

As far as the plot goes, it’s fairly straightforward. We’re following your standard group of 80s high school students: Phil (played by Lee Montgomery of Ben and Burnt Offerings fame), Mitch (Peter DeLuise of Solarbabies), Mary (Dedee Pfeiffer of Vamp and The Horror Show), Vinnie (LeVar Burton of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Melissa (Shari Belafonte-Harper, who’s been in a million TV shows and has also released a couple of albums). They all live in a stereotypical small town called Pitchford Cove, Massachusetts (which looks a lot like Hill Valley from Back to the Future and may have been shot on the same set), and it seems that most of their families can trace their ancestries back pretty far.

Near the beginning, Phil gives a presentation in class that fills in some back story about the town, specifically regarding a witch named Lucinda Cavender (Jonelle Allen), who put a curse on the town before being executed on Halloween night three centuries ago. Melissa is actually Lucinda’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter, which will play into events later on. Phil, as it happens, is also the direct relative of town witch-hunter Nathaniel Grenville, who by the way owned Lucinda Cavender as a slave.

So it’s Halloween, and after a few scenes of high school shenanigans (such as Mitch lusting after a new substitute teacher), the gang of lovable miscreants decide they’re going to do Halloween up right by breaking into the town’s witchcraft museum and stealing the clothing off the wax figures of their ancestors to wear as kick-ass costumes. While there, they find a neglected section of the building that has all kinds of historical artifacts, so they decide that while they’re committing a crime, they might as well go whole hog and boost all that shit too.

After their amusing jaunt into petty larceny, they all end up at the cemetery, where they open a trunk they found at the museum. Inside the trunk, there’s a scroll and a ring bearing the initials of Nathaniel Grenville. Because these dummies evidently have not seen The Evil Dead, they decide they’re going to recite the creepy incantation on the scroll, because that’s never come back to bite anyone in the ass or anything. Melissa gets super into it and the others get freaked out, but turns out she was just joking…or was she? Then they all leave the graveyard to get ready for the big Halloween party that’s happening later at (I think) Melissa’s house.

Even though they stole some costumes, only Mitch and Melissa wear what they took, and Mitch didn’t even bother with the pants, so he’s like Puritan on top but jeans and sneakers on the bottom. Pretty low effort, Mitch. Expending even less effort is Vinnie, who just half-assedly wraps some bandages around his head and part of his regularly-dressed midsection, then splatters them with ketchup and raw eggs (???) to I guess give the whole emsemble that authentic mummy feel. Phil dresses like a vampire but with a silver “punk” wig and Dada-esque, geometric makeup (so maybe a glampire?), and Mary claims she’s the Bride of Frankenstein (all the better to seduce her unnamed crush, who’s dressed as Frankenstein’s monster), but she just looks like an 80s movie “punk” chick, with a leather jacket festooned with chains, a blue leopard print dress, and completely normal blonde hair that’s teased up and sprayed a bunch of different colors.

Speaking of 80s movies and Halloween costumes, can we take a minute to appreciate just how random some of the extras’ costumes inevitably are in 80s movies? I mean, in this case, there were some recognizable costumes, like more punks, vampires, a cow, a ghost, a majorette, a George Washington looking dude, a retro 50s chick, and a Native American woman (kinda problematic). But then there was a dude kinda dressed like a mummy, but like a princess/ballerina version? And a dude who looked normal but had a douchey sweater draped around his shoulders like his costume was “fraternity shithead?” Anyway, just an observation. I did spot someone in the crowd dressed as Magenta from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the substitute teacher character from earlier shows up dressed as David Bowie from the “Modern Love” video, so there was some style going on at this party at least.

I’d also like to note that during the party and throughout the whole film, we occasionally hear the voice of the very famous Wolfman Jack as the town’s DJ, doing a Halloween playlist over the radio. The songs are mostly oldies and are about what you’d expect: Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising,” Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” The Guess Who’s “Clap for the Wolfman,” stuff like that. The only featured songs that were contemporary with the film were “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths (which came out in 1984 and is prominently played during the party and a vampire attack scene), and a song written especially for the movie called “Get Dead,” which is sung by Shari Belafonte-Harper herself and has a whole Thriller-like dance number that goes with it.

Anyway, unbeknownst to the gang, their cemetery incantation worked way better than expected, because minutes after they leave, pretty much every damn dead person in the place crawls up out of the grave and starts shambling around. The spell specifically said something about “demons of every kind,” so other than your traditional zombie/ghoul type monsters, there’s also at least one werewolf, because why not, and Lucinda Cavender herself also resurrects, though she isn’t a witch as previously established, she’s actually a vampire, which makes no sense, but let’s just roll with it.

Oddly enough, even though all the other dead folks look…well, dead, there is one exception in the form of beautiful sixteen-year-old cheerleader Sandy (Jonna Lee), who we later learn died in 1959. Phil, a likably geeky fellow who drives a sweet, powder-blue, 50s-era car, sees her wandering around the town and takes a shine to her, telling her to come to the party he’s on his way to. She doesn’t, but after Phil leaves the party early due to not getting any traction with his crush Mary, he runs into Sandy again and the pair have a bit of a romance. We as the audience know that Sandy is dead, but clueless Phil just thinks she’s been away from the town a long time, hence why she thinks there’s still a malt shop on Main Street and still uses words like “ginchy.”

So the dead people invade the party, and no one is the wiser because everyone has costumes on. Lucinda bites Melissa, her great (x4) granddaughter, and from there, Melissa bites Vinnie, and soon the vampire plague is spreading like the..um…plague. Elsewhere in town, Mitch’s cranky, drunken asshole of a father, Judge Crandall (played by none other than Kevin McCarthy, of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and The ‘Burbs) gets attacked by a bloodsucker and transorms into one, and a security guard who’s constantly spitting tobacco juice everywhere gets mauled by a werewolf, later turning into one himself.

Oh, and I neglected to mention that Dick Van Patten also has a small role in this, as a cheerful dentist who is also Phil’s dad. He gets turned into a vampire later too, and it’s pretty hilarious.

By the third act, pretty much the whole town has become either vampires, werewolves, or generic ghouls except for Phil, who’s been spending some alone time with (dead) Sandy, who drops hints about her status as no-longer-living that the oblivious Phil fails to pick up on. After Phil tells Sandy about the stolen costumes and the whole “reciting an invocation in the cemetery” deal, Sandy informs him that in order to get rid of all the monsters, he’ll need to reseal the scroll with wax mixed with Nathaniel Grenville’s bones, then stamp the wax seal with Grenville’s ring, which Mitch is wearing as part of his costume. This all has to be done before midnight, or else all the townsfolk who have been turned into undead creatures will stay that way forever.

So the climax of the movie is basically Phil and Sandy fighting through all the monstrous townspeople in order to retrieve the ring from Mitch and get to the Grenville crypt to collect some bones to mix with the wax. Of course they’re able to do this just in the nick of time, only for Phil to realize that the girl he’s fallen hopelessly in love with after only spending ten minutes with her is, in fact, dead, and has to go back to her grave along with the rest of the zombies and monsters after the spell is reversed. She is able to call Wolfman Jack from beyond the grave and dedicate a song to him, though, so that’s nice.

Interestingly, the end of the movie just shows Phil driving away from the cemetery with Barbara Lewis’s song “Baby I’m Yours” playing on the radio. Everything has presumably gone back to the way it was before—since the damage done to Phil’s car and to the graveyard itself during the fracas has vanished—but we never get a scene showing that all Phil’s friends or indeed any of the other town residents went back to normal (or came back to life if they were killed in the course of the evening’s events). So I suppose it’s totally plausible that Phil is now the only person left alive in Pitchford Cove, which I guess will make his morning commute much easier at least.

This isn’t necessarily a lost classic or anything, but it is a really entertaining, affable slice of 80s Halloween cheese. As I mentioned, it’s much more funny than scary, and though it does have some deaths, it’s all treated in a pretty lighthearted way. It’s a hoot seeing so many familiar actors turning up (such as RoboCop‘s Kurtwood Smith as the town sheriff), and as a whole, the characters are pretty likable. It’s a simple story that doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense if you think about it too hard and it does sort of meander in places, but it’s got an appealing, nostalgic Halloween vibe to it that would make it a great addition to any seasonal movie playlist, especially if you want something that younger kids can watch without getting traumatized. There are a couple of bootleg versions up on YouTube as of this writing, so if you’re interested, go check the movie out before it gets taken down.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.