Chattanooga Film Festival 2026 Coverage
The Mid-Night Driver review
An urban legend turns into a ride from heck.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
The Mid-Night Driver
Directed by Alex Cherney
Written by Alex Cherney
Starring Devan Delugo
The Mid-Night Driver Review
Next up in our journey through this year’s Chattanooga Film Festival is a good old-fashioned urban legend tale. As far as urban legends go…The Mid-Night Driver has a good one. It perfectly fits the sleepover with friends vibe that the story begins with. The actual implementation of the urban legend is more of a solo affair. While The Mid-Night Driver has a few lulls dependent on your investment in the strangeness of its concept…it builds to a very creepy climactic scene that leaves you happy to have taken its twisted ride.
Three friends decide to try out an urban legend one night. It involves calling upon a mysterious driver who takes you someplace you may never return from. It fails. Claire (Devan Delugo) decides to try it again once she’s alone. This time, a car pulls up in front of her house. Inside, a silent driver awaits.
Claire makes it back from the strange experience just fine…but her friends don’t believe the event ever took place. It doesn’t help that trying the ritual again with all of them present results in another big bowl of nothing. Claire comes up with a plan to prove her experience was real…she grabs a video camera…and calls upon the driver again.
The second trip doesn’t go as smoothly as the first one. Directed by simple messages appearing on the radio screen, Claire is sent on a strange series of fetch quests…each surrounded by their own dangers. If she wants to get home…she has to complete them all. Oh…and she isn’t going to have any proof of this adventure anyway. The creepy driver isn’t a fan of being caught on camera.
The Mid-Night Driver is set in 1992. Aside from explaining how teenagers know how to use a landline (and doing away with the cellphone during crisis problems, of course) there isn’t much reason for it. I mean…I guess those are the reasons. Phone related activities are much different now than they were in the early 90s.
In the intro to this review, I referenced Claire’s experience as a “ride from heck”. That was intentional. The Mid-Night Driver never veers into over-the-top blood and guts. It doesn’t feature anything that would push it into a “too intense for younger horror fans” territory. But it does maintain a quiet and unnatural menace that should prove effective to all ages. Especially when it’s approaching the story’s end. Younger viewers can handle what The Mid-Night Driver is doing…but the climax has a good chance to scare the wits out of them. And that’s an awesome thing.
As you can tell…the concept leads to a fairly simple narrative here. But it’s an effective one. The driver is an odd duck in every way. Claire faces imposing obstacles to continuing her trip home. It even finds a way to deliver a bit of a lore dump in the middle of the fetch quests. This is the section where The Mid-Night Driver might struggle to hold up its momentum for you…but the last destination is well worth getting to. A sequence set inside of a shack with the directive to acquire a rose is the standout element of the film. It’s genuinely creepy from start to finish and is worth going out of your way to watch.
The Mid-Night Driver is a slow-burn horror movie. While its ultimate destination doesn’t exactly let the fuse explode…it does light the way towards one of the more effective horror sequences out there right now. Most importantly, the idea of the midnight driver urban legend is a strong one. The movie is lean enough to not waste time on b-plots or other off ramps. The story centers fully on Claire and the position her phone call puts her in. With minimal dialog and some strong horror concepts in play…The Mid-Night Driver is worth giving a call.
Scare Value
The Mid-Night Driver is an effective little urban legend horror story. Claire knows that the person in the story she heard never returned from his trip with the silent, creepy driver. As she slowly discovers what she needs to get take to the next stop…the stakes raise around her. Fetching a pear leads to some information about what’s happening. Fetching a rose leads to one of the creepiest scenes I’ve seen in a while. The entire journey leads to a worthwhile entry in the urban horror genre.
