Unfortunately, personalized terror is exactly what we want to see, otherwise, we’re simply watching another run-of-the-mill ghost movie. Alex, Miles, and Kelly never even bother to mention their fears during the game like Anna and her friends did, so their scenes of terror are never personalized. While IT took the time to tap into each character’s nightmare and scare the daylights out of them accordingly and in exceedingly clever ways, The Midnight Man does no such thing.
MIDNIGHT MAN GAME FULL
When compared to another film which pits a monster who manifests into children’s deepest fears, Andres Muschietti’s widely popular IT (2017), it’s clear that The Midnight Man does not use its premise to its full potential. The mysterious creature lurks and does scare those who venture to play his game, but he never actually uses any players’ fears to kill them. The entire story is based on the lure that this creature will use the players’ deepest fears against them, but this rule of the game is all but forgotten. There is a surprising lack of Midnight Man antics. The next flaw is more of an omission – that of the Midnight Man himself, in fact. The suicide plays into later events in the film, but by the time the connections are made between all of the storylines, we are exhausted and frustrated by the convoluted nature of the movie. There is an attempt to remedy this fact with a tragic backstory for Alex wherein her mother commits suicide, but the story is so muddled that we fail to care very much about that, either. Relatedly, we know next to nothing about Alex or her friends, so it’s difficult to make any emotional connections with these characters or care about their survival. The story of Anna’s experience with the Midnight Man in her youth dives straight into the turmoil without giving us time to care about Anna or her friends beyond the fact that they are children in peril. The first glaring flaw is that the film does not give us enough time to digest each plot line or the characters at play. Naturally, the supposed teenagers decide to play the game and are taunted by the dreaded title monster. When Alex’s grandmother asks that she fetch an old hand mirror from the previously off-limits attic, Alex and her friend Miles (Grayson Gabriel) discover a worn-out box bound with rope, the contents of the box being the necessary parts to play the Midnight Man game.
![midnight man game midnight man game](https://www.ihorror.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Midnight-Man.jpg)
Her granddaughter, Alex (Gabrielle Haugh), acts as a live-in caregiver for the fragile, agoraphobic, and not entirely sane woman.
![midnight man game midnight man game](https://whisperingdark.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/mm.png)
![midnight man game midnight man game](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-k8qnUQFM5VE/VENkdDsM8bI/AAAAAAAAA8o/nni6R36kdzQ/s1600/midnightgame.jpg)
Years later, the remaining child is now an elderly grandmother, Anna, played by Lin Shaye.
![midnight man game midnight man game](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/jacksepticeye/images/a/a7/The_Midnight_Man_logo.jpg)
Of course, the game goes terribly wrong, leading to the gruesome deaths of two children, while one lone girl’s life is spared. It’s soon revealed that this is all part of a game in which the children must follow a few simple rules to avoid the clutches of the Midnight Man, lest he use their deepest fears against them. Inside, a small group of children are gathered within a circle of salt, avoiding a creature they refer to as “the Midnight Man”. The film opens in a large, shadowy house set in 1953. Travis Zariwny’s latest, The Midnight Man, is just that – a watchable, yet unremarkable, amalgam of any number of the latest supernatural films. If you’ve ever wondered what a cross between Ouija (2014), The Bye Bye Man (2017), and a heavy dose of Insidious (2010) would look like, search no further.