The professional relationship between Netflix Y mike flanagan It has given many joys to lovers of the horror genre. It all started with the platform buying the rights to ‘Hush’ and since then we have received titles like ‘Gerald’s Game’, ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, ‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’ and ‘Midnight Mass’.
Everything indicates that this agreement will last longer, since it is a matter of months before we can see his controversial adaptation of ‘The fall of the house of Usher’ and he already has a television version of the comic ‘Something is Killing the Children’. However, the protagonist today is ‘The Midnight Club’well this remarkable series premieres this Friday, October 7 on Netflix.
Flanagan’s involvement
Adaptation of the homonymous novel by Christopher Pike‘The Midnight Club’ is a series in which Flanagan does not exercise absolute control, since he is a co-creator with leah fong, with whom he had already collaborated on ‘The Curse of Bly Manor’, and is only in charge of directing its first two episodes. Then it is true that he participates in the script of 9 of the 10 episodes, but always in collaboration with at least one other person.
Some may still be wondering why so much information about Flanagan’s contribution to the project is coming, but a series that you dominate creatively almost down to the last detail, such as ‘Midnight Mass’, is not the same as another that is not commissioned either. , but there is much more room for more people to get involved. Perhaps that is why ‘The Midnight Club’ has a more youthful approachalthough that also comes from the adapted material.
That does not mean that ‘The Midnight Club’ has much in common with what one would associate with a story starring teenagers, since barely a few minutes pass from the first episode to make it clear that the macabre is going to have a prominent presence in the Serie. After all, all the protagonists suffer from a terminal illness and they find themselves in a hospice making the expected as bearable as possible until the fateful outcome that everyone considers inevitable.
All the virtues of ‘The Midnight Club’
There the series opts for two great claims to engage the public. The first is that midnight club to which the title of the series alludes, since it tells terrifying tales that in themselves could have been the basis for an exhilarating anthology. The second is the mystery about what the hell happened there long ago and how it connects that with the current situation of its inhabitants.
Obviously, the series is more than that, but the important thing is that everything is very well dosed, knowing the moment in which it is necessary to enhance the characters, the mystery or the setting work. The latter is gaining weight as the episodes go by -for now I was able to see the first six and there are ten in total-, since certain discoveries are made that make it quite clear that something is happening there, thus feeding both the curiosity of its protagonists and of the viewer.
In addition, the young cast is very well chosen, with Iman Benson supporting in a remarkable way the dramatic weight of the function -his character could easily be somewhat repellent but that never happens-, and in the most veteran there is an effective mixture between old acquaintances of Flanagan as Zach Gilford or Samantha Sloyan and new signings like Heather Langemkampthe unforgettable Nancy from ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’.
Otherwise, Flanagan sets the tone very well in the episodes he directs., incidentally planting all the seeds for what follows, gathering itself in a logical and satisfactory way when other filmmakers enter the scene. I have not forgotten either the effective alternation between what is happening there and the stories that they tell us, where it is inevitable that some engage more than others, but always contributing something instead of simply being something to fill footage.
It is true that this tension that flies over at all times is not as sinister as in other works by Flanagan, but that does not mean that it is a more conventional proposal. Here the malrollero element is growing gradually and it has a great base in the fact that any of the protagonists could die the next day and that it was consistent with what we have seen until then. That factor suits ‘The Midnight Club’ very well, and that the mystery it raises does not revolve so much around what could happen to them as about what happened there.
In short
‘The Midnight Club’ is a somewhat different series from the others that Mike Flanagan has done for Netflix, but the result it’s very worth it, since it twists its most youthful aspect to give us a macabre story that works quite well in all its aspects. In addition, he remembers to leave space for the characters to be more than mere pawns in the story and even shows a more playful streak with the stories told by his protagonists.
In Espinof: