Movies - TV
The Big Difference Between Midnight Mass And The Midnight Club
By HANNAH SHAW-WILLIAMS
Writer/director Mike Flanagan has firmly established himself as Netflix's king of thoughtful, slow-burn horror with an October 2022 release of Christopher Pike’s "The Midnight Club." The show is based on the novel with the same name, following a group of terminally ill teens living in a hospice, who sneak out of their rooms at night to meet up and share scary stories.
After "The Haunting of Bly Manor" and before "The Midnight Club," Flanagan wrote and directed the horror miniseries "Midnight Mass." Like "The Midnight Club" characters, who are facing death at a cruelly young age, "Midnight Mass" also explored death and how we deal with our fear of it.
In "The Midnight Club," the group of kids discusses that whichever one of them dies first will try to contact the others from the other side. In a "Midnight Mass" scene, a character who knows their own death is imminent delivers an eight-minute monologue on what they believe will happen to them when they die.
But as moving as the speech in "Midnight Mass" was, Flanagan is aware that younger audiences might not have the patience for lots of long soliloquies — and therein lies the difference between his two "Midnight" shows: "I wouldn't subject a viewer of 'The Midnight Club' to an eight-minute monologue."