Director: Sean Masterson
First aired: 2022
Contains spoilers
Mr. Midnight: Beware the Monsters is a Singapore originating series, filmed in English primarily and aimed at teens. It concerns itself with a group of friends who become aware of strange supernatural goings-on in their town, Tanah Merah, and set out to investigate. Mr Midnight is a mask wearing avatar they use to post videos about their exploits.
The friends are Tyar (Idan Aedan) a young man who is, by birth, a dukun, but who is unaware of his heritage. A dukun is a shaman of sorts who spirits are attracted to. His friend Ling (Chen Yixin) is the daughter of Uncle Tan (Yu-Beng Lim), who runs an antique store and is the source of their knowledge of the occult. Third is Nat (Caleb Monk), who is used frequently as a comedy character but who also wears the mask and acts as Mr. Midnight and finally there is English exchange student Zoe (Nikki Dekker).
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| lamppost leap |
One of the issues I had with this episode is, because I look at one-of vampire episodes as standalones, it was light on plot, relying more on the wider story that was being built in the season to carry it. Great in that context but perhaps weaker as a vampire episode. In the episode before, the gang had been embroiled with a ghoul who had lured Zoe off and locked her in a coffin. Though they rescued her, at the end of the episode we see the vegetarian eating raw meat. This episode begins with a scene of a man in a car park at night, down from a lamppost jumps a thing, clearly in the funeral garb preferred by the kyonsi.
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| Zoe vamping |
In the morning we see Zoe plastering makeup on, eating a sliver of raw meat and then acting strangely, and seductively, towards son of her host family, Ben (Maxime Bouttier), before leaving the house. The news is full of the murder of a man, exsanguinated and found in the car park. At school Nat is practicing with the cheers squad when Zoe enters the gym and starts dancing. The dancing is infectious. Everyone bar Tyar are affected, and he breaks the spell for Ling. The gym students collapse at the end of the dance, Zoe pushes Ling to the floor calls Tyar dukun and leaves with Nat. We’ve seen that her teeth have sharpened.
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| stiff limbs |
School is cancelled due to the mass hysteria (of the dancing) and unable to contact Zoe or Nat, Tyar and Ling go for a coffee, hear more about the murder and decide to sneak into the morgue. They manage to look at the corpse when he awakens and comes after them, his limbs, as he pursues, stiffening and he beginning to move in the famous hop from Hong Kong cinema. They manage to escape, get supplies from Uncle Tan’s shop to deal with Chinese vampires (and make the point that they react to things differently from Western vampires) but then Nat and Zoe lure the other two to where they are…
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| prayer scroll |
Why the kyonsi is in Singapore is not discussed. Prayer scrolls will paralyse the vampires, bagua mirrors force them back and vinegar burns. Sticky rice aids the journey of the trapped spirit at the core of the vampire. What is less clear lore-wise is the hopping. The main kyonsi seems quite fluid of movement, the newly created one in the hospital quickly becomes the stiff corpse of the traditional depiction. However, Zoe shows no stiffness and all I can think of was that she was bitten (unseen in the previous episode) but not killed. This is probably why she could be turned back when the main kyonsi is defeated.
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| bagua mirror |
There was so much more they could have done with this episode – indeed in referencing Hong Kong movies, as they did, I expected some more set pieces (like a holding the breath set piece). The episode wasn’t terrible but probably does not hold-up as a standalone. That said I was rather taken with the series as a whole and, for an audience of the target demographic, it seems like good fun. For the vampire episode, as a stand-alone, however 4 out of 10.
The episode’s imdb page is here.
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