A new setting and a new Midnight Society bring fresh scares when the group’s leader suddenly vanishes, prompting the remaining members to search for clues, confront dark forces, and ultimately uncover the truth behind their seaside town’s terrifying curse.
Nickelodeon did extremely well with its television series (2019-2021) featuring The Midnight Society’s nerdy bunch of kids who question each other’s ability to handle the fright factor of the stories they gathered around the campfire to listen to at midnight. When Leader and core member, Connor Stevens (Parker Queenan), comes up missing, they rally together to investigate the clues surrounding his mysterious disappearance and while they unravel the mystery, the knowledge they gain turns out to be working against them as the real world they live in becomes just as creepy as the stories they have been telling one another. Luke McCoy (Bryce Gheisar), Connor’s best friend, feels mainly responsible for Connor’s disappearance because on the night he went missing, he asked Connor to go with him on a search and Connor refused because he had gotten in lots of trouble previously after following Connor’s hunches about ghosts. The individuals who comprise the group, which consists of five teenagers and a tag-along little brother, is a culmination of different personalities that use their own strong points to sort through the clues. When they realize they must seek guidance from Sardo (Richard Dumont), who runs Sardo’s Magic Mansion, they get more than they bargained for because of his unwillingness to share all the information they need due to his fear of the unknown and his experience with ghosts.
As The Midnight Society branches out to solve the mystery, they find that the entire town is under a curse from “Shadow Man” and the ghosts have unfinished business resulting from a young girl, June Murphy (Genea Charpentier), who petitioned to save the town’s lighthouse. As the mystery unravels, they realize they must follow The Book of Shadows which created the curse. When they follow a list that was left by Connor, they realize that he was documenting the things that he needed in order to solve the mystery of June Murphy and the Shadow Man who seems to have taken her away. The DVD consists of six episodes which include “The Tale of the Haunted Woods,” “The Tale of the Night Frights,” “The Tale of the Phantom Light,” “The Tale of the Danse Macabre,” “The Tale of the Midnight Magic,” and “The Tale of the Darkhouse.” In each of the episodes, as the group gets closer to solving the mystery, they realize that they all must make some personal sacrifices in order to gain more ground as a unit. As their group gets smaller and smaller due to the Shadow Man’s bag of tricks, they take extreme measures outside of their original goals in order to get their friend and leader back.
Director Jeff Wadlow did an excellent job in adding elements of humor to the scary stories that appear to have massive appeal to teenagers. In addition to building the group into a cohesive unit, he also took time to develop the characters and focused on their individual personalities to guide the group in using each other’s strengths and weaknesses to resolve their issues and focus on the task at hand. While the stories being told were very frightening amongst the teens, each person in the group was able to leverage their fears in order to accomplish their goal of saving their leader.
Now available on DVD
