For the past twenty-seven years, one of my annual Halloween watches is the little known horror comedy The Midnight Hour. It first aired on ABC on November 1, 1985 (Yep, one day after Halloween and two days after Garfield's Halloween Adventure aired on CBS) when I was a four-year-old. At the time my parents and I lived in a two-story farmhouse in the country (which was also haunted) and my parents recorded it onto a VHS tape. I would pester my mother into letting me watch The Midnight Hour, even though The Elf would always freak me out.
The Midnight Hour is set on Halloween in the small town of Pitchford Cove, New England. Five high school seniors, Phil (Lee Montgomery), Mary (Dedee Pfeiffer), Mitch (Peter DeLuise), Vinnie (LeVar Burton), and Melissa (Shari Belafonte), break into the town's museum. They steal (or should I saw "borrow") a few costumes and an old trunk. They open the trunk at the local cemetery, in which they find a mysterious scroll. Melissa reads the scroll aloud, unleashing a horrible curse.
A few minutes after the kids leave the cemetery, the undead rise from their graves. The undead's leader is Melissa's own ancestor, Lucinda Cavender, who was put to death over 300 hundred years ago for being a vampire.