Midnight Visitor
Citizens TV, Channel 27
Tuesdays 9 p.m., Fridays midnight
Online archive updated after airing
Picture this: You’re a 16-year-old in New Haven. It’s midnight on a Friday. You’re flipping through the channels on the TV in your grandma’s basement. 26, 27, 28 … wait, what? You flip back to channel 27, and there he is: Dean Dream, a vision of old Hollywood glamour, promising 30 minutes of spooky stories with his “co-ghost” Dustin, a plastic skeleton in a rocking chair.
You’re not dreaming. In fact, you’re in someone else’s dream.
Whose? None other than Sev Phillips, the face behind Dean and one of the four wonderfully twisted minds behind Midnight Visitor, an instant occult classic creeping its way into New Haven’s public-access television landscape on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. and Fridays at midnight, courtesy of 843 State St. television station Citizens TV.
In the innocent hours of daylight at Spruce Coffee, only steps away from where the show’s filming takes place, Phillips chatted with me about the humble details of his grandest visions.
He laid out a scenario of a bored teen finding unexpected solace in the stylized sets and hair-raising tunes of Midnight Visitor, which has been on the airwaves for just over a month now. Featuring recurring characters, guest stars and curated selections of early 20th-century fringe film, the show keeps it both local and truly bizarre. Public-access television, for Phillips, is a chance to create treasures for strangers to stumble upon.
“Good evening, my bewitching beloveds. And welcome to the show for those who want to know that this world isn’t all there is,” Dean Dream begins Midnight Visitor’s third episode. Titled “Camping,” the episode aired on TV last week and will have its online premiere on YouTube later this month. I was able to get an unholy sneak peek despite my lack of cable, for a spiritual price yet to reveal itself.
The guest star in “Camping” is musician, music therapist, and video game designer Dan Goldberg, also known as The Spookfish, coming on set to tell the story behind his song “Black Ghost With Red Eyes.” It’s an equal-parts chilling and oddly comforting tale about loneliness, acceptance, and embracing life’s mysteries. Goldberg’s gentle voice and Dean Dream’s attentive gaze add an anchor of empathy to the fantastical nature of the show.
Another guest story, appearing in the form of a “terrifying transmission” over the phone, recounts a camping trip rife with unwelcome, perhaps even undead, visitors. In an impressive feat of investigative journalism, Midnight Visitor ends the segment with a note on historical disappearances near the camp site in question, including descriptions matching figures from the story.
Throughout it all, the show offers lush aesthetics and an obvious attention to detail that lets the viewer know that they’re safe inside this haunted house. They would never be left hopeless, scared out of their wits without sufficiently miserable company, or worst of all, bored.
Phillips and his ragtag crew—made up of Phillips, his partner Mickey Coy, his friend from camp Rex Morris, and Morris’ partner Midge Morris—scramble to learn production lingo on the fly. Meanwhile, people in film school and beyond are amazed by the fact that Midnight Visitor is a real TV show on a real TV channel.
“Public access is my dream,” a lighting tech recently told Phillips on a shoot for another project. What that tech might not have known is that making a local television show is, in Phillips’ words, “much more accessible than people think.” Citizens TV is eager to remind those who come across their path that they can sign up for free video production classes (email akosarko@citizenstv.org to inquire) and then just…submit their shows.
Okay, rewind. It was a bit flippant to call Rex a friend from camp. Phillips and Rex met at a YMCA camp in Connecticut 20 years ago, and they’ve been making normies rue the day ever since. The two artists, along with Midge and Coy, come from a background as noise musicians, and they pay tribute to their noisy beginnings in a Midnight Visitor segment paradoxically titled “Moment of Silence.” In it, avant-garde tunes from friends serve as an eerie soundtrack to early-1900s experimental silent films found on the public domain.
Episode 3’s Moment of Silence features otherwordly, percussive music from The Spookfish himself. On screen, windmill blades morph into hands, the moon travels through the sky seemingly of its own volition, and frightening creatures hold hands in a circle. It sounds like what goth robots might club to, and it looks like what they’d see in their nightmares after one too many oil shots. The scenes are from Alexandre Alexeieff’s 1933 surrealist animation “Night on Bald Mountain,” one of Midnight Visitor‘s miraculous finds.
My impression from the freaky nature of Phillips’ show was that he and his weird art friends were doing their sacred duty to push the envelope of what the media format normally allows. When I told this to Phillips, he set me straight.
“No no no, we are the latest iteration of that,” he said. “In the ’80s or ’90s there were even weirder people doing weirder things.” For example, there was the late Bob Paglia, a New Haven legend who would dress up as Dracula to review movies on air at Citizens TV. Public-access television, it seems, is where eccentrics go to play.
Phillips shares Paglia’s drive to entertain, as well as his love for the big screen. “All I do for fun is watch movies,” Phillips said, telling me about the Italian slasher flicks and silent films that speak to his letterbox’d heart. I lamented New Haven’s lack of movie theaters after the Bow Tie’s untimely passing (Rest In Popcorn), and Phillips responded, “It makes me ill that we don’t have it.”
We all find different ways to cope. Midnight Visitor’s set is a true movie-lover’s blend of core elements from horror, noir, and ‘90s public-access glory. Its warm, fuzzy blur is cozy and nostalgic, while its draping shadows unsettle the viewer just enough to imply something sinister just below the surface. Phillips told me the team wanted to create a look “from a time you can’t quite place.”
After each shoot, the Midnight Visitor crew packs up their furniture and decorations to store in Citizen TV’s communal prop closet for next time. The ephemeral nature of their set doesn’t stop them from going hard in the details and lighting. After all, Phillips explained, they are “creating a place where you want to be for half an hour.”
Then there are the jarring Australian accent and bumbling mishaps of Kenneth Brenda, a ghost expert unafraid to get spooked, cursed, haunted, or all three in his pursuit of the supernatural truth. Brenda, also played by Phillips, goes out into the field, and the camera goes with him—sometimes with a confessional cam as well, for added drama.
In “Camping,” Brenda tries and fails to strike it out on his own, struggling in the dire isolation of the wilderness before breaking the fourth wall to ask his camera crew if anyone brought a can-opener. Like a cat afraid of his own tail, Brenda then mistakes his crew for ghosts and confuses himself into a state of frozen terror.
Brenda came out of an acting class Phillips took a few years ago, when Phillips tried to imagine the demeanor and cadence of the World’s Worst Paranormal Investigator. Midge, “the perfect person to man the iPhone,” helped bring Brenda to life.
“Being that silly publicly” is something the actor hadn’t done in a while; now the practice helps him trade self-consciousness for comic gold. When I told Phillips his character took me back to the early aughts, he agreed, likening the segment to what “you used to watch when you were sick in 2007.”
If you’d like to be part of Midnight Visitor’s program, you can leave a voicemail at (475) 209-2099 or email midnightvisitor1984@gmail.com to share a story of your own. It doesn’t have to be a scary one; the team welcomes accounts of synchronous dreams, visitations from loved ones, and other instances of what Phillips calls “the beautiful, wonderful things you can’t explain.”
With carefully collected oddities and plenty of heart, Midnight Visitor is found footage in the making. So find it, if you dare.
