Death is both inevitable and terrifying, and the question of how we face it has inspired stories for thousands of years. These tales can be horrifying, allowing people to confront their primal fears by imagining the worst ways they can die and what they would do to survive. They can also be moody and meditative, examining how we make the most of the time we have and remember those we have lost. Sometimes, they can brilliantly combine a bit of both.
Mike Flanagan is a master of this sort of elevated horror. His adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House examines how unresolved grief and the fear of future misfortune tear a family apart. In Midnight Mass, Flanagan reckons with his Catholic upbringing to put a twisted spin on religion’s promise to provide the faithful with a form of immortality. But death is truly omnipresent in his lesser-known 2022 Netflix series The Midnight Club, which is set in a hospice home for terminally ill teens and young adults.
One of the ways the residents of the Brightcliffe Home deal with their shared fate is gathering at midnight to share scary stories. The Midnight Club is an adaptation of YA horror author Christopher Pike’s 1994 novel of the same name, but Flanagan also uses the premise to craft an anthology horror series that incorporates many of Pike’s other books. It’s a framework very similar to the one Flanagan would later use to pay tribute to Edgar Allan Poe in his 2023 Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher.
All of the young characters grapple with death in different ways, and the stories they tell reflect their fears and wishes. The genre-hopping tales include a witch trying to change the future, time travelers attempting to stop nuclear war, and a runaway on the road with a pair of hitchhikers confronting some dark truths. Each actor plays the star of the story their character tells to emphasize how personal it is, though the format also offers the opportunity for guest appearances from Flanagan regulars like The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass star Rahul Kohli. While it’s a YA series, the themes are often very dark, involving self-harm, drug use, and homophobia, along with the ever-present specter of terminal illness.
While they confront their fears by night, during the day many characters dream of ways to escape their fate. The Midnight Club’s main plot focuses on a new Brightcliffe resident, Ilonka (Iman Benson), who is convinced she might be able to find a cure for her thyroid cancer. Ilonka’s quest drives her to try all sorts of unconventional treatments like foul-smelling smoothies, which infuriates her roommate Anya (Ruth Codd), who has accepted her own bone cancer with grim humor.
Ilonka starts researching a cult called Paragon that believes the land Brightcliffe was built on has healing properties. A mysterious woman named Shasta (Samantha Sloyan of The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass), who Ilonka meets in the nearby woods, spurs on Ilonka’s search even as the head of Brightcliffe, Dr. Georgina Stanton (Heather Langenkamp), tries to dissuade Ilonka from looking into the facility’s past.
The Midnight Club is brutally honest about death, making it clear that there’s no rhyme or reason to who is spared and who dies young, and attacking the selfishness of people who would harm others to escape their own fate. But Flanagan also celebrates the connections that make life worth living, a point heartbreakingly made in a twisty episode that marks the first death of a core member of The Midnight Club. The loss is made more acute by the fact that it’s a harbinger of the fate that awaits all of the residents of Brightcliffe, but it’s also a call to action to make the most of the time you have rather than holding out hope for a miracle.
Unlike most of Flanagan’s Netflix shows, The Midnight Club was meant to have a second season, but was canceled after just one. It leaves off with a bit of a cliffhanger, though if you want to know what was going on, Flanagan explained everything in a blog post. But the show’s more complicated mysteries are in many ways beside the point, and given that the show is about lives prematurely cut short, it’s oddly fitting that Flanagan didn’t know how much time he’d have to tell the story. The Midnight Club is a life-affirming series that uses numerous subgenres of horror to demonstrate the courage needed to live a life without fear and regret. It’s scary and sad, but in the end it’s really a beautiful tale about valuing the friends you can share a good story with.