Midnight Club review: Midnight Mass creator’s scary Fault in Our Stars

In the mid 1990s, America’s children were gripped by Goosebumps fever. R.L. The entry-level horror novels of R.L. Stine are no more than 150 pages long. Their textual jump-scares, cliffhanger endings (which suggested the horrifying only to be interrupted by the mundane on the next page), and overall promise to deliver formulaic scares but with enough variation to give the reader a sense of surprise each time they read them were infamous.

The first issue was published in 2002. Goosebumps book (1992’s You are welcome to the Dead House(and roughly simultaneously with these Stine titles Phantom of the Auditorium, Attack of the MutantPlease see the following: The Night at the Terror TowerChristopher Pike has published his own YA novel. The Midnight Club, which marks a sharp contrast to Stine’s intentionally cheap thrills. Pike’s book, which concerns the late-night storytelling rituals of a clique of adolescent hospice patients, is low on incident, high on rumination over the meaning of life and death, and crushingly sad. It depicts the various stages of grief that a small group of young terminally ill people experience. Importantly, the book can be easily read in half of the time that the Netflix version, which is a 10-hour long, takes. Haunting at Bly Manor co-producer, Leah Fong. Perhaps surprisingly to fans of the book, however, despite frequent narrative fidelity, the tone of Flanagan and Fong’s Midnight ClubR.L. Stine is closer to R.L.

The Midnight ClubIlonka (Iman Benjaminson) is a young cancer patient who recently moved to Brightcliffe. Brightcliffe is a youth hospice located in an old seaside home. Before long, Ilonka has been welcomed into the titular pseudo-secret society of nocturnal storytellers made up of a handful of other patients — Flanagan and Fong expand Pike’s five-person ensemble with an additional three club members — including Kevin (Igby Rigney), with whom she immediately falls into the sort of tragic love on which YA weepies thrive.

The group’s habit of gathering at midnight in the hospice library to sit by the fire exchanging spooky stories is granted tacit approval by staff members, including nurse practitioner Mark (Zach Gilford, returning to the Flanagan repertory after starring in 2021 Netflix hit Midnight Mass) and head honcho Dr. Stanton (Nightmare on Elm StreetHeather Langenkamp, alum. Ilonka, though, is far from content to accept her prognosis and begins a frantic search for anything that might promise to extend her life, a quest that will lead herself and her friends into the dangerous and potentially supernatural web that is Brightcliffe’s past.

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

As detailed in a recent Vanity Fair profile on the show’s production, Flanagan has long hoped to adapt Pike’s novel, even flirting with attempting to shoot it as his debut feature. Flanagan and Flanagan expanded the story to accommodate streaming, which is evident from the fact that it will be an ongoing series rather than the short-lived miniseries Flanagan provided previously to the streamer. However, the creators feel obliged to provide a lot more narrative content. This is why the series seems both wildly incompatible with and faithful to the book. To comprehensively detail the creators’ additions would require more words than this review is allotted, but suffice it to say viewers of The Midnight Club will be treated to ghostly visions suggesting a haunted Brightcliffe, portentous nightmares foretelling a grisly fate for the club’s members, a buried backstory involving a mysterious former patient, and frequent intimations of another even-more-secret society complete with a signature symbol found on various meaningful objects/characters’ bodies.

Only one of these narrative threads is actually going to lead anywhere during the first season. Other stories are being teased until the end, when the cliffhanger reveals will be revealed. The relevant storyline concerns a prior generation’s Brightcliffe patient who, like Ilonka, refused to accept the inevitability of her demise. To say too much about this plot line, which consists of fairly brazen breadcrumbs all leading to a series of reveals that are unlikely to shock any savvy viewer, would risk spoiling the show’s true narrative spine. The fact that only one spoilable aspect of the show is a new episode for TV shows how awkwardly these threads have been woven. The story of Ilonka’s investigation into Brightcliffe’s most notable former patient takes place largely away from the purview of the other characters, meaning she is able to essentially step from one story into a separate, entirely original TV show, one that only reintegrates in time for a climax of spectacular hysteria that makes the core setup of a bunch of sick kids supporting one another through storytelling seem abruptly quaint.

It’s a thick and heady bouillabaisse, and that’s before even considering the series’ framework: As the Midnight Club gathers to tell their stories, we see those stories brought to life in episodes-within-episodes that also happen to star members of the main ensemble. Thus, The Midnight ClubThis is effectively an anthology television series. The characters use their imaginations as a way to cope with their pain and fears. Flanagan and Fong decided to adapt Pike’s stories for the novel instead of adapting them. They also adapted additional Christopher Pike novels, including 1993’s slasher. The Wicked Heart and the same year’s spectral Road to NowhereThese young storytellers allegedly created ).

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

Photo: Eike Schroter/Netflix

Club member Spence, Chris Sumpter, explains the difference between Startling It’s scary: “Anyone can bang pots and pans behind someone’s head. That’s not scary, it’s just startling, and it’s lazy as fuck.” It’s a bold pronouncement, clearly meant to be taken as a statement of purpose from the show’s creators, but Flanagan and Fong can’t quite manage to stick to their own stated values. The club’s stories are suffused with cheap jolts, more reminiscent of haunted house rides than genuine get-under-your-skin horror. Only one, Kevin’s serialized telling of The Wicked Heart, which stretches the surprisingly grisly tale of a teenage thrill killer across several episodes, lingers for long after the credits have rolled, while others (notably Spence’s sci-fi yarn about a time-bending VHS tape) seem designed to evaporate as soon as they’ve unspooled. In one case, a story — the adaptation of Road to Nowhere which features a particularly welcome guest appearance from a longtime Flanagan collaborator — overtakes the majority of the episode, and it represents the writers’ most robust effort to externalize a character’s inner turmoil through storytelling. But it leads only to a maudlin climax that’s quickly swept aside in favor of returning to the pressing business of finding more mysterious symbols where they should not be.

There seems to be some essential gulf in verisimilitude in Flanagan and Fong’s approach to The Midnight Club. The series’ world is lush and immersive, which will come as no surprise to the many fans of the prolific Flanagan, but the characters inhabiting it can’t seem to sink into their environs. The young actors are able to be covered in as many gloomy makeups as they like, yet it doesn’t seem that the production is trying too hard. The emotional underpinnings are similarly undercut by a reliance on platitude — staff members are frequently found reminding their patients that, reAlly, we’re all dying (it’s never fully acknowledged quite what cold comfort this would likely provide), while one climactic emotional peak is accompanied by the slogan-worthy “Dying is a really shitty reason not to live.” It may be that a mercilessly realistic vision of terminal illness in young people would prove too alienating a prospect for a Netflix YA audience, but the softened edges constitute a breach in the show’s realism, offering creature comforts at the expense of a feeling of truthfulness.

By no means do all of Flanagan and Fong’s additions work to the show’s detriment. As with Flanagan’s previous Netflix projects, each member of the ensemble is granted ample shading of character, which comes to most powerful effect in the stories of the two gay characters (double the number featured in Pike’s novel), whose lifestyles are far richer and more nuanced than their equivalents were afforded in the story’s original iteration. The invented characters are drawn with appealing wit and personality, each of them fitting comfortably into the margins of Ilonka and Kevin’s doomed love story. Flanagan is unquestionably a gifted artist, but he seems incapable of creating anything truly bad. ShineContinuation Doctor SleepThis assessment might be disputed by some.

Last year was last year. Midnight Mass proved something of a word-of-mouth sensation for Netflix, and though there was a tendency to gripe over the show’s density of stagey monologue — the absence of which in The Midnight Club proved headline-worthy — it’s a remarkably self-assured and tonally consistent work, telling a taut story with attention evenly spread across a sprawling ensemble, all of it culminating in a shocking yet retrospectively inevitable denouement. It’s perhaps unfair to judge Flanagan’s newest series against the standard of such a wildly different story, one spun for audiences a decade or two older than the ideal Midnight Club viewer. This new project is a snug fit, at least visually and tonally, with the other hauntings Flanagan created for Netflix. The Midnight Club’s fumbled attempts at world-building stick out like the unsuccessful tracks on a familiar band’s new album.

The series might have been created for a different audience, so a mixup of The Fault In Our StarsNickelodeon is a mainstay Do You Fear the Dark?This could be a win-win formula for teens, if not preteens. They will appreciate the Flanagan/Netflix partnership’s well-oiled aesthetic gears and the familiar jump scares that are sure to keep them awake at night. This curious experiment in literary adaptation may provide valuable material for budding media analysts. It doesn’t take much conscious thought to detect that The Midnight ClubThis is one strange object. Investigating how and why Pike’s novel could end up looking like Flanagan and Fong’s series might prove even more enlightening than Ilonka’s plunge into the depths of Brightcliffe’s shadowy past.

The Midnight Club Netflix is streaming it now