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  USA. 1985. Director – Jack Bender, Teleplay – Bill Bleich, Producer – Ervin Zavada, Photography – Rexford Metz, Music – Brad Fiedel, Special Effects – Jack Monroe, Makeup Effects – Tom Burman Studio, Production Design – Charles Hughes. Production Company – ABC Circle Films. Cast: Lee Montgomery (Phil Grenville), Shari Belafonte-Harper (Melissa Cavender), Jonna Lee (Sandy Matthews), LeVar Burton (Vinnie Davis), Peter De Luise (Mitch Crandall), Jonelle Allen (Lucinda Cavender), Cindy Morgan (Vicky Jensen), Deedee Pfeiffer (Mary Masterson), Kevin McCarthy (Judge Crandall), Dick Van Patten (Martin Grenville), Mark Blankfield (The Ghoul), Kurtwood Smith (Captain Warren Jensen), Dennis Redfield (Lester Mitchell), Sheila Larken (Janet Grenville), Joe Gieb (Elf)  

The Halloween special and effective horror are usually mutually exclusive things. It is just the same as the attempts to mix horror and music – there has never, as far as I am aware, ever been a good horror song that works in terms of horror as all that singers do is turn things into jokily unserious riffs on monsters and scary things. Likewise, Halloween specials reduce the monsters to comedic caricatures and almost always fail to take the material seriously. Anything scary ends up, as here, going no further than Halloween masks and cliched mist-covered graveyards, with the monsters treated no more seriously than Halloween revellers – a running gag throughout the film centres on a zombie sitting on a settee in the midst of the party or partygoers’ reactions to the monsters’ appearances assuming them to be costumes. On of the pluses is Jonelle Allen who has an aloof presence that glides through the film – although she disappointingly fades away from the film once she infects Shari Belafonte-Harper with the vampire bite.

Certainly, the film does feature a great soundtrack of classic monster-themed songs – Devil or Angel (1960) by Bobby Vee, Lil Red Riding Hood (1966) by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Bad Moon Rising (1969) by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Clap for the Wolfman (1974) by The Guess Who, and naturally In the Midnight Hour (1966) by Wilson Pickett – even peculiarly at one point, The Smiths’ How Soon is Now (1984). Indeed, with its dancing and comically friendly as opposed to threatening monsters, The Midnight Hour could almost have been conceived as a feature-length expansion of the Michael Jackson Thriller (1983) music video. The film stops still at one point so that Shari Belafonte-Harper can sing a song Get Dead with a chorus of dancing zombies and vampires where she offers up such groan worthy lines such as “I’m dead, you’re dying/Everybody should try it, get dead.”

One of the most fascinating things about The Midnight Hour in retrospect is the cast line-up, which includes many names that would go onto bigger and better things. A couple of years later LeVar Burton became a fan favourite as navigator Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94); Shari Belafonte was the daughter of singer Harry Belafonte and was just starting to find her career as an actress; Peter DeLuise is the son of Dom DeLuise and has had a regular career as an actor, perhaps best known to genre fans as a regular on tv’s seaQuest DSV (1993-6); Deedee Pfeiffer is the younger sister of Michelle, although her career as an actress never took off. Lee [Harcourt] Montgomery had a minor genre career as a child actor in the 1970s in films such as Ben (1972) and Burnt Offerings (1976) but faded away not long after this. Director Jack Bender has almost exclusively worked in television, although did venture onto cinema screens with Child’s Play 3 (1991).