Plot: At a hospice with a mysterious history, the eight members of the Midnight Club meet each night at midnight to tell sinister stories – and to look for signs of the supernatural from the beyond.
Review: It probably goes without saying that at this point, people are going to watch The Midnight Club simply because Mike Flanagan‘s name is attached to it. After the acclaim for The Haunting of Hill House, Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor was met with a slightly less enthusiastic welcome. But, Flanagan’s Midnight Mass was a masterpiece of storytelling. If the pattern holds, The Midnight Club would be a weaker entry into the horror maestro’s oeuvre of shows. Luckily, I am glad to say that the series has broken expectations. The Midnight Club is nothing like any of Flanagan’s previous films or series but impresses nonetheless by combining an original story based on the novel of the same name by Christopher Pike. Bringing more scares than the novel but managing to keep the same themes of grief and death while expanding into new territory, The Midnight Club is a thrilling ensemble drama that will please fans of the book and Flanagan’s works alike.
Developed alongside his Bly Manor scribe Leah Fong, The Midnight Club is much more than just an adaptation of Christopher Pike’s novel of the same name. Having read all of Pike’s novels in my younger days, I revisited The Midnight Club in anticipation of this series. The book is surprisingly not a true horror story but instead a fairly grounded look at a group of teens facing their impending deaths. Each character shares a story with the titular club, many of which are pretty underwhelming. Flanagan and Fong have taken that weakness of the source material to heart and replaced those stories with other writings by Pike himself. In essence, The Midnight Club plays like the greatest hits of Christopher Pike’s bibliography with the stories told by the characters coming from various novels like Gimme A Kiss, Road To Nowhere, Witch, The Wicked Heart, and more. It is a brilliant way to flesh out this story to series length while giving Pike’s works their due.
The biggest expansion to this adaptation of The Midnight Club is the underlying mystery of Brightcliffe, the hospice where the teens meet one another. Led by Dr. Georgina Stanton, played by A Nightmare on Elm Street scream queen Heather Langenkamp, Brightcliffe has a history that intrigues the newest resident, Ilonka (Iman Benson). While she joins the other teens at their midnight story-sharing sessions, Ilonka delves into the past residents of Brightcliffe and the origins of the Midnight Club itself. Where the novel was rooted in a realistic story of death and dying, this series adds a paranormal bend that echoes the ghosts of Mike Flanagan’s prior series but without going too overboard. The format also allows for the excellent cast, some of whom are veterans of Flanagan’s troupe of actors including Zach Gilford, Samantha Sloyan, Matt Biedel, Robert Longstreet, and Rahul Kohli, to play different characters in the various stories within the main story.
The main teen cast is by far the highlight of this series which never feels artificial in the way that countless YA adaptations come across as pandering to the viewer rather than treating the high school-aged characters who spout dialogue that is either incredibly wooden or far out of alignment with how teenagers actually speak. While Annarah Cymone, who plays Sandra, and Igby Rigney, who plays Kevin, both appeared in Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, the rest of the teens are new additions including Chris Sumpter, Aya Furukawa, Ruth Codd, Sauriyan Sapkota, and Adia. The teens, who spend more time on screen than any adult cast members, all share great chemistry and make their roles feel layered rather than the somewhat two-dimensional versions in Pike’s novel. Everyone gets a solid amount of screen-time over the ten-episode series and are all bound for great roles after The Midnight Club premieres on Netflix.
While Mike Flanagan only directed the first two episodes of the series, he shares a script credit on nine of the ten episodes. The directors on tap for this series include Michael Fimognari and Axelle Carolyn, who have worked with Flanagan before, as well as Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr, Viet Nguyen, and Morgan Beggs. On the writing side, Flanagan’s co-creator Leah Fong wrote three episodes along with Julia Bicknell, Elan Gale, Chinaka Hodge, and Flanagan’s brother James. While Christopher Pike does get an executive producer credit, The Midnight Club feels every bit a Mike Flanagan production. With music from The Newton Brothers and editing by Lucy Donaldson, both prior Flanagan collaborators, The Midnight Club shares the aesthetic of the filmmakers’ previous Netflix series while still coming off as fresh and unique enough to stand on its own. In many ways, I felt this series is the tone and format that Josh Boone was aiming for with The New Mutants, but The Midnight Club is superior to that film in every way.
The Midnight Club is a treat for fans of both Mike Flanagan and Christopher Pike, blending the best qualities of both into a series that is at once a tribute to the author’s novels and an original creation that adds to the director’s growing list of quality series. Flanagan and Fong have elevated what YA programming can be by making The Midnight Club a series that works for both younger audiences as well as adults because it set out to tell an engaging, emotionally resonant, and, yes, scary story. While it may not be as viscerally frightening as The Haunting of Hill House, this series is a very balanced combination of drama and horror that has more than enough spooky moments to draw you in and even more powerful storytelling to keep you engaged. As much as I loved The Midnight Club as a book, I think I love the series even more. By far the most varied storytelling of any Flanagan series to date, I hope The Midnight Club prompts viewers who never read a Christopher Pike novel to go back and check him out.
The Midnight Club premieres on October 7th on Netflix.