Witches and werewolves don’t often mix, but they did in two television projects aimed at younger audiences made seven years apart. First came the Canadian animated special Witch’s Night Out from 1978. The sequel to 1974’s The Gift of Winter, which features a pre-SNL Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd in its voice cast, Witch’s Night Out brought Radner back to play a Witch who’s peeved that she doesn’t get to enjoy Halloween like she used to. That changes when the people in her town decide to have a party in her allegedly haunted house, a bash spearheaded by the officious Goodly (co-writer/director John Leach). He’s the sort of guy who, when he decides to throw a party, immediately assigns jobs to all his friends and sits back and lets them do all the work.
Meanwhile, two children named Small and Tender (Tony Molesworth and Naomi Leach) are excited about dressing up as a werewolf and ghost for Halloween, but are dismayed that everybody knows who they are and aren’t scared of them. Before you know it, Small is wishing he was a real wolf man and Tender is wishing she was a real ghost, which is music to the Witch’s ears since she swoops in to grant their wishes. Their babysitter, Bazooey (Gerry Salsberg, another holdover from The Gift of Winter), is aghast, but the Witch assures him that it’s just “harmless amusement” and grants his wish to be the Frankenstein Monster for the night, ignoring the implication in her rhetorical question, “What can go wrong?” Plenty, it turns out.
Due to its brevity, Witch’s Night Out doesn’t give Small, Tender, and Bazooey much time to enjoy their monstrous forms before regret sets in and Small starts whining about wanting to go home. Meanwhile, the Witch’s magic wand winds up in the hands of Malicious and Rotten (Catherine O’Hara and Bob Church), who abuse its power, much like Goodly lets the power go to his head when Nicely (Fiona Reid) encourages him to take charge after they’ve been scared out of the Witch’s house. All is made right again when the Witch recovers her wand and is able to transform everybody in town into what they want to illustrate what Halloween is all about. “Every day we go about our lives in the same old way. But once a year we can be whatever and whoever we please.” Amen.
The transformation of an entire town into a variety of monsters is also the crux of The Midnight Hour, which aired on ABC on November 1, 1985, thus missing when it’s set by one day and for no discernible reason other than the 1st was a Friday. Anyway, the town of Pitchford Cove, Massachusetts, is all set to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the execution of witch Lucinda Cavender by Witchhunter General Nathaniel Grenville, whose descendant Phil (Lee Montgomery) gets caught up in some supernatural shenanigans when he and his high school friends (one of whom is Lucinda’s descendant Melissa, played by Shari Belafonte-Harper) steal some costumes from the local Witchcraft Museum along with a trunk containing a scroll which brings the dead back to life when it’s read in the graveyard. That includes a well-preserved Linda and an extremely shaggy werewolf. Before long, he’s putting the bite on the locals and making more werewolves, and she’s putting the bite on the students gathered at Melissa’s Halloween party, because I guess she came back as a vampire.
Anyway, The Midnight Hour is pretty strong for something that aired on network television 40 years ago. Its supporting cast also features some recognizable faces, including LeVar Burton as another one of Phil’s so-called friends, Kevin McCarthy as the town’s judge and father of one of his other friends, Dick Van Patten as Phil’s father (a dentist), Kurtwood Smith as a police captain whose first line of dialogue is a disdainful “Halloween, my favorite day of the year,” and the voice of Wolfman Jack as the radio DJ who plays Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” every hour on the hour. Other seasonally appropriate songs on his playlist include Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” (previously used in An American Werewolf in London), Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ “Little Red Riding Hood,” The Guess Who’s “Clap for the Wolfman,” and The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.” The movie stops dead in its tracks, though, for a “Thriller”-like dance number for the original song “Get Dead,” sung by Melissa. The most amusing moment in the film, though, comes when the whole town is in an uproar and the first werewolf actually tears a fire hydrant out of the ground. All things considered, he could have done something much worse to it.