The Midnight Club: Everything We Know So Far About Mike Flanagan's New Netflix Series
Nobody's telling horror stories quite like Mike Flanagan right now. His films and TV shows are equal parts heartbreaking and terrifying. His characters are often holding onto deep-seated emotional wounds, many of which are brought painfully to the surface in the face of some monstrous threat or supernatural danger. Even when he's adapting the works of literary titans like Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, Flanagan carefully re-works and re-purposes the source material, making it firmly his own.
His latest Netflix series, "The Midnight Club," once again sees Flanagan adapting someone else's work, this time that of Christopher Pike's 1994 young adult horror novel of the same name, with "Once Upon a Time" alum Leah Fong serving as the show's co-creator. Flanagan was among the young readers who took to Pike's book upon its release and he's been hoping to adapt it to the screen ever since. With its premiere date lurking around the corner like a ghost hiding in the walls of Hill House, it's time we run-down everything we know about the series so far.
When is The Midnight Club coming out?
"The Midnight Club" will begin streaming October 7, 2022, on Netflix, with all ten episodes dropping at the same time. The show was announced in the early months of the pandemic back in May 2020, at a point when it was unclear when movies and TV series would be able to safely resume production. Filming ultimately began in March 2021 and lasted about four months, leaving plenty of time for Flanagan and his team to finish post-production.
Spooky season has gradually become a big deal for Netflix (as well it should be), and that will remain the case in 2022. "The Midnight Club" will kick-of a month full of intriguing releases from the streamer, including Henry Selick's stop-motion horror-comedy "Wendell and Wild" starring Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele, and Guillermo del Toro's horror anthology series "Cabinet of Curiosities." Whatever flavor of horror you prefer, there will plenty of new options to choose from on the service come October.
What is The Midnight Club about?
"The Midnight Club" takes place at a hospice for terminally ill young adults, where eight patients gather every night at midnight to tell one another stories — promising the next of them to die will find a way to contact the others from beyond the grave, proving there's more after death. Doesn't exactly sound like a fail-proof plan, but hey, young people are going to be young people.
If you felt like Flanagan's last horror show for Netflix, the somewhat divisive "Midnight Mass," was a little too slow and heavy on the long-winded speeches in-between the scarier scenes, you may find "The Midnight Club" more your speed. In an interview with Empire Magazine (via Bloody Disgusting), Flanagan promised the series wouldn't skimp on the frights viewers expect from his work (The Bent-Neck Lady, anyone?) nor go overboard on the extended monologues. He also said the show would remain faithful to the spirit of Pike's original novel and his writing in general:
"[Pike] wrote some pretty advanced stuff for his younger readers, and it was not at all uncommon for his teenage characters to die, pretty shockingly. His books were full of things I found really exciting and thrilling and dark."
Who is working on The Midnight Club?
In addition to serving as a co-writer and executive producer with Fong, Flanagan directed a handful of episodes of "The Midnight Club." Other directors for the series include Morgan Beggs ("Once Upon a Time"), Axelle Carolyn ("The Haunting of Bly Manor"), Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour ("Black Box"), Viet Nguyen ("Chilling Adventures of Sabrina"), and Flanagan's longtime director of photography Michael Fimognari (who also called the shots on the "To All the Boys" sequels "P.S. I Still Love You" and "Always and Forever").
The cast of "The Midnight Club" includes "Midnight Mass" alum Zach Gilford and horror royalty Heather Langenkamp, who played the role of "Final Girl" Nancy Thompson in Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street." Also starring are the likes of Iman Benson ("blackAF") and Samantha Sloyan ("The Haunting of Hill House," "Midnight Mass"), as well as Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, Annarah Cymone, William Chris Sumpter, Adia, Aya Furukawa, Sauriyan Sapkota, and Matt Biedel.