Netflix‘s The Midnight Club -the 1990s, America’s children were engrossed by Goosebumps fever. These entry-level horror stories by R.L. Stine, never more than near 150 pages in length, were notorious for their word-based jump-scares, their cliffhanger chapter endings that suggested the horrific solitary to be punctured by mundanity on the following page, and their overall capacity of formulaic scares with just enough variation amid books to allow for a feeling of discovery respectively time.
Two years afterward the publication of the first Goosebumps book (1992’s Comfortable to Dead House) and roughly parallel with such Stine titles as Phantom of the Auditorium, Attack of the Mutant, in addition to A Night in Terror Tower, Christopher Pike published his own YA novel, The Midnight Club, which symbols a sharp contrast to Stine’s deliberately cheap thrills. Pike’s book, which anxieties about the late-night storytelling rituals of a clique of young hospice patients, is low on the incident, high on contemplation over the meaning of life and death, and exultantly sad.
The book paints a vivid and emotionally callous portrait of the stages of grief banquet across its small ensemble of terminally ill young people. And, crucially, it can be restfully read in about half the time afforded to the new 10-hour Netflix edition helmed by house stylist Mike Flanagan and his Lingering of Bly Manor co-producer, Leah Fong. Perhaps astoundingly to fans of the book, however, despite frequent narrative fidelity, the tone of Flanagan then Fong’s Midnight Club is far closer to R.L. Stine than to its apparent source.
The Midnight Club Revealed Perfect Screen Horror Buffs
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The Midnight Club centers on Ilonka (Iman Benson), a cancer persistent who recently arrived at Brightcliffe, a youth hospice kept in a creaking seaside manor. Before extensive, Ilonka has been received into the titular pseudo-secret society of nocturnal storytellers made up of a minority of other patients — Flanagan and Fong increase Pike’s five-person collective with an additional three club members — counting Kevin (Igby Rigney), with whom she closely falls into the sort of tragic love on which YA tear-jerkers thrive.
The group’s habit of assembly at midnight in the hospice library to sit by the fire exchanging spooky stories is granted tacit endorsement by staff members, including nurse practitioner Mark (Zach Gilford, chronic to the Flanagan repertory after starring in 2021 Netflix hit Midnight Mass) and cranium honcho Dr. Stanton (Nightmare on Elm Highway alum Heather Langenkamp).
Ilonka, nevertheless, is far from content to accept her prognosis and commences a frantic search for anything that might aptitude to extend her life, a quest that will principal herself and her friends into the dangerous and potentially paranormal web that is Brightcliffe’s past.
As thorough 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. However, in expanding the floor to fit the demands of a streaming series (and there is every indication that this is future to be an ongoing narrative rather than the miniseries that Flanagan has previously provided the banner), the creators seem to have felt obliged to add in heaps of additional story grist.
Thus, the series is instantaneously highly faithful to, and madly at odds with, the book. To widely detail the creators’ additions would require more words than this evaluation is allotted, but suffice it to say viewers of The Midnight Club will be pickled to ghostly visions suggesting a haunted Brightcliffe, portentous hallucinations foretelling a grisly fate for the club’s members, a buried backstory involving a mysterious previous patient, and frequent intimations of another even-more-secret society comprehensive with a signature symbol found on various telling objects/characters’ bodies.
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