With a premiere scheduled for October 7 (and a first trailer released in June), Netflix has unveiled the first images of ‘The Midnight Club’ (The Midnight Club), the new horror series from maestro Mike Flanagan (‘Midnight Mass’).
Based on the novel by Christopher Piketo which other stories by the author are added, the ten-episode series leads us to meet a group of eight teenagers, with a terminal illness, who meet every day at midnight to tell each other stories, making a pact along the way : The next one to die will make a sign from beyond the grave.
As their nightly meetings continue, strange things start to happen in the building. Things that we see from the point of view of the boys, something that Flanagan recognizes in an interview with Vanity Fair:
“The thing is, we’re not really sure what to believe, especially because of some of the medications that kids are on, some of which can cause all kinds of hallucinations and nightmares and stuff like that.”
mystery in the hospice
“Then there’s another hospice mystery about a patient from many years ago who claims to have discovered something in the building that cured her and she walked out healthy. That’s a mystery that cheers the boys up for a while.”
And it is that the exploration of faith and belief, a recurring theme in Flanaganwill be an important point in ‘The Midnight Club’:
“For us, the driving force of the first season is that these kids really want some kind of consolation that their lives aren’t really over. They believe that the bonds they have formed are strong enough that one can go back and say to the others “Don’t be afraid. There is something else on the other side.”
adaptation is from a book that has fascinated Flanagan since it came out in 1994. So much so that already in her first years of career she wrote a treatment for a low-budget film that was strongly opposed by the publisher.
Anecdotes aside, Flanagan clarifies why he is obsessed with this novel:
“The Midnight Club was a particular shock to me as a teenager because I thought I was picking up this junior pulp novel that was going to be about the Grim Reaper or something. But no, it was about teenagers having to come to terms with terminal illness and death. And he didn’t throw punches there either. It was a real lesson in how you can use gender to talk about serious things. This is before I was half “promoted” to Stephen King. It was right out of John Bellairs and RL Stine, so this totally messed me up.”
In the cast we meet Iman Benson, Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, Aya Furukawa, Annarah Shephard, William Chris Sumpter, and Sauriyan Sapkota like hospice patients; Heather Langenkamp, Zach Gilford, Matt Biedel and Samantha Sloyan round out the cast.