Year: 1985
Runtime: 94 mins
Language: English
Director: Jack Bender
Phil, Melissa, Mitch, Mary and Vinnie are a group of high‑school friends who, on a Halloween night in Pitchford Cove, unintentionally raise the dead. As ghouls and resurrected bodies roam the town, the friends must confront the chaos they’ve unleashed, discovering that the night will change Pitchford Cove forever.
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Read the complete plot breakdown of The Midnight Hour (1985), including all key story events, major twists, and the ending explained in detail. Discover what really happened—and what it all means.
On Halloween night in the quiet town of Pitchford Cove, Massachusetts, five high school friends, Phil Lee Montgomery Grenville, Mary Dedee Pfeiffer Masterson, Mitch Peter DeLuise Crandall, Vinnie LeVar Burton Davis, and Melissa Shari Belafonte Cavender plan on making it a night they will never forget. They sneak costumes from the town’s historic museum and come across other old artifacts, including a dusty trunk that hides a paper scroll with an ancient curse. When Melissa Cavender recites the curse at the local cemetery, a chilling shift occurs in the town, and a long-dormant threat suddenly wakes up.
The dead rise under the leadership of Lucinda Cavender [Jonelle Allen], a witch who was put to death three centuries earlier. She and the other undead begin to roam the streets, turning heads and bending the night to their eerie rhythm. As Melissa Cavender and the rest of the party go on with their Halloween festivities, Phil encounters a mysterious girl, Sandy Matthews [Jonna Lee], dressed in a vintage 1950s cheerleader outfit, who warns him that the town is in far greater danger than anyone suspects.
The undead crash the costume party, and at first the effect is barely noticed because everyone is in disguise. But Lucinda’s power intensifies, and she begins transforming partygoers into vampires and other dark creatures, with Melissa Cavender among the first victims. Realizing that the spell tied to the cemetery is the source of the chaos, Phil and Sandy join forces to find a way to reverse it. The key to breaking the curse lies in locating the Grenville Spirit Ring, hidden inside the grave of Nathaniel Grenville—a witch-hunter who was Phil’s great-great-great-great-grandfather and who once owned Lucinda Cavender. The race is on to retrieve the ring and use it to undo the spell before midnight.
As authorities shrug off the warnings, Phil takes matters into his own hands, fashioning silver bullets from his father’s silver coins to combat the risen dead. The plan leads them right into the heart of the chaos at the Halloween party, where the transformation runs unchecked. Phil seizes control of the situation, obtaining the Grenville Spirit Ring from a zombified Mitch and racing with Sandy toward Grenville’s crypt. There, they exhume enough of Grenville’s bones and dust to address the scroll, just as Lucinda and her horde close in.
In a tense confrontation, they seal the parchment with candle wax at the crypt’s edge, and Sandy tells Phil she loves him—an intimate moment that marks the turning point of the night. The magic collapses: every creature born of the curse vanishes, wounds mend, and the town appears to revert as if the events never happened. Yet the night’s revelations linger. Phil finds Sandy’s grave and learns a startling truth: she had been one of the undead all along. As the clock strikes midnight and Phil begins to drive away, he hears a music dedication on his car radio from “Sandy,” a haunting sign that she will continue to watch over him from beyond the grave.
Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 14:21
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