Netflix: how is The Midnight Club, Mike Flanagan’s new horror series for the platform

the midnight club (The Midnight Club, United States, 2022). Creators: Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong, based on the novel by Christopher Pike. Cast: Iman Benson, Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, William Chris Sumpter, Aya Furukawa, Zach Gilford, Annarah Cymone, Sauriyan Sapkota, Heather Langenkamp. Available in: Netflix. Our opinion: good.

In their teens, the director, screenwriter and showrunner mike flanagan read the novel Christopher Pike the midnight club and immediately established a very deep connection with one of the many works young adult of the prolific writer. “I thought I was going to read something pulp about death but it wasn’t like that, it was about teenagers who were looking to reconcile with the illnesses they had, and that completely surprised me,” he said. the director, one of the new and most attractive voices of contemporary terror.

After premieres for netflix of the miniseries The Curse of Hill House (2018), The Curse of Bly Manor (2020) and midnight mass (2021), Flanagan, propped up by Leah Fong, finally adapted Pike’s novel after having tried it years ago in feature film format, a project that never came to fruition. In this case, the midnight club is his first series for the platform, with a first season that, faithful to the style of its co-creator, is long (it consists of 10 one-hour episodes) and has a cadence reminiscent of that of The Curse of Bly Manor as for the climax to which it arrives in the last chapters, and that of midnight mass in relation to the extensive monologues of his characters with their diatribes about time and duels.

As the director of doctor sleep, Pike’s work was not exactly looking for dramatic effects: it narrated the progression of a friendship between seven people soon to die disguised as a terrifying story. In tune with the base material, Flanagan and Fong build their story without neglecting that starting point and, even with some ups and downs along the way, they deliver a sad but not distressing fiction, an achievement if we consider its premise.

the midnight club is set almost exclusively in the Rotterdam hospice, an old and imposing restored house (one of those that Flanagan uses to display his virtuosity as a director) where young people who were diagnosed with terminal illnesses go to die there “on their own terms”. At this point, the series shows these teenagers denying how they are treated in a world where those around them tend to fall into set phrases that permanently remind them that their days are numbered. Therefore, When the protagonist of the story, Ilonka (Iman Benson), sees how her dream of studying at Stanford is frustrated and she cannot live with the glassy gaze of her adoptive father, she decides to take control of her own narrative and enter that place.

However, there is something else that motivates Ilonka, a born leader, vehement and reckless, to enter that unknown area: the news that in the 60s a young woman who stayed in Rotterdam got the cure for her illness. While Flanagan and his writing team are very cautious about how to handle such a touchy subject as the impact terminal diagnoses have on young patients, they’re not evasive about it either. For this, they do not need to show the progressive physical deterioration of their protagonists (The midnight club is a series about persistence, about being present and building communities) Instead, they choose to carefully outline the personalities of these seven teenagers who live under the same roof and promise, if they die, to communicate from the afterlife. The supernatural edges are present in the series and Flanagan does not spare the sudden appearance of chilling figures in the corridors of that hospice, but his interest lies elsewhere, in what shook him when he read Pike’s novel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX7lqSyXquUI

In this way, every episode of the midnight club it has intervals in which these young people narrate, on the nights they meet in the library, horror stories (and with metatextual winks) that they conceived with parallels to their own lives. This is how Ilonka invents an avatar, Imani, a clairvoyant who seeks to protect her friends from impending tragedies; and how spencer (William Chris Sumpter, the revelation of a series that bets on a cast of unknown actors), who suffers from HIV, tells a story of acceptance that crosses science fiction with romanticism queer. The nights that the friends spend together reaffirm their need to apprehend every minute, and it is in that acceptance of what is coming that Flanagan conceives the best sequences, as it happened with the devastating end of The curse of Bly Manor.

Also, in the midnight club Many actors from his previous fictions appear, from Zach Gilford to Samantha Sloyan in a character that provides the magical (and ominous) content. to a series that at times falters in its compulsion to encompass everything, but that represents another triumph for Flanagan and the fascinating universe that he has been creating in which it is now the teenagers who take the lead.

The first season of the midnight club is available on Netflix.