The Midnight Hour, or, Why isn't this a Better Hocus Pocus? (Patreon)

Seriously, I don’t understand why The Midnight Hour  isn’t a beloved classic alongside the likes of Hocus Pocus and Creepshow. It’s an absurd exercise in camp, teen horror, and it even features a breakout musical number. It’s a feature length Thriller music video. What more is there to want? 

The Midnight Hour has been generally panned. Everyone from local newspaper critics to academics writing books on zombie movies have lamented this film. Hocus Pocus makes for a great point of comparison. Both films were panned on release, both films were designed for a more disposable market—Hocus Pocus was a direct-to-video release and The Midnight Hour was made-for-TV—and both films feature some star talent. 

Hocus Pocus is still critically divisive. As of this writing, it has a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s lower than Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The difference between The Midnight Hour and Hocus Pocus is that HP now has an official product line through Disney and is a Halloween TV movie favorite. Why? I shout to the heavens! WHY‽

A decent chunk of this can be written off by just looking at Disney’s relative power compared to ABC… Or at least I would say that, but Disney owns ABC. Yes, a certain portion of this can be explained by the clearly higher production value of Hocus Pocus, but, to be honest, it’s barely higher. The Midnight Hour has better special effects, but worse lighting and costuming is a bit of a tie. What, then, is the difference? Well, let’s use the SPOOKY SCIENCE and find out! 

The Midnight Hour opens with a nod to The Nightmare on Elm Street so intense that it practically knocks you out of your seat. The film features a Frankenstein, maybe 5 different Draculas, a Wolfman or two, a LeVar Burton Ketchup Mummy, and the entire cast of Thriller. It’s a film that knows horror history and wants to interact and engage. It knows that a witch is more than a bit of set dressing, it’s a character with a rich and dark history. The same for the rest of the monsters. They are both spooky props and metaphors interwoven with cultural weight. The Midnight Hour knows what Hocus Pocus does not. 

In Hocus Pocus, our historic witches are disconnected from their witchy history. Or at least the movie attempts to do this. Every twist and turn tries to flatten their characters into simple tropes: the evil witches on one side and a pure virgin on the other. The film wants you to walk away with easy interpretations and anything deeper needs to be wrestled from this text almost in spite of it. 

The Midnight Hour drags you kicking and screaming into some active interpretations. At one point in the film the text becomes a game of Tri-Dimensional Chess. Our exacerbated heroes have just left the police station after trying, in vain, to explain to the cops that a werewolf is loose in the streets. Sandy (Jonna Lee) the resurrected 50’s cheerleader turns to our protagonist Phil (Lee Montgomery), who is unable to accept that Sandy is a zombie, and says: “Your starting to sound like those cops back there.” This is moments after a love scene where gender roles were reversed and all in front of a backdrop of an immortal witch/demon/vampire played by Jonelle Allen attempting to raise an army of “demons from hell” to take over the world. 

You could do a dissertation on the political implications of that scene alone. 

At the end of the night, The Midnight Hour is worse on a few technical aspects, and I don’t expect a 4k restoration any time soon, but I am left wondering if the film’s more complicated story isn’t a leading reason in its status as a “lost” gem.