With Halloween on the horizon, it’s the perfect time for some spooky stories. You’ll find plenty of them in The Midnight Club, an adaptation of Christopher Pike’s 1994 YA novel of the same name, in which teens grappling with their own mortality gather together to try to scare each other.
The show is set in the 1990s at Brightcliffe, a hospice center for terminally ill teens. After long days of treatment and therapy, they gather at night to form “The Midnight Club,” sharing scary stories and raising toasts to those no longer with them. They’ve also formed a pact to try to communicate with each other after death.
The format combines a bit of anthology horror through their story sessions with a creepy and dramatic metaplot. Are there ghosts haunting the halls of Brightcliffe or are the apparitions just conjured by their fear and pain medications? As the members of the club become a family, they share stories about themselves and seek ways to save each other.
All 10 episodes of The Midnight Club will be released on Oct. 7.
While The Midnight Club is perfect for teens, it’s not recommended for young kids. Beyond the horror elements — which include ghastly creatures and a serial killer — there’s also some very grown-up subject matter like drug addiction, self harm and attempted suicide.
Mike Flanagan is the show’s co-creator, along with Leah Fong, and one of The Midnight Club’s executive producers. A prolific horror filmmaker and showrunner, he created and directed the original Netflix series Midnight Mass. Flanagan has plenty of previous experience with adaptations, having directed and scripted films based on Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep. He created The Haunting anthology series, which adapts The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw as The Haunting of Bly Manor. Flanagan is also working on an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which will be released next year.
Flangan often works with the same group of actors, so many of the faces in The Midnight Club will be familiar if you’ve seen any of his previous shows or movies. Cast members Igby Rigney, Matt Biedel and Annarah Cymone all appeared in Midnight Mass. Samantha Sloyan appeared in Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House and Flanagan’s thriller Hush. Zach Gilford was also in Midnight Mass, though you may also recognize him as one of the stars of Friday Night Lights. Horror fans may also remember Heather Langenkamp from the Nightmare on Elm Street films.
Christopher Pike is a best-selling author of thrillers and horror novels for young adults and kids, most of which were written in the ’80s and ’90s. Flanagan and Fong both grew up reading his work, and Flanagan pitched Pike the idea of adapting The Midnight Club. Pike, who serves as an executive producer on the show, read through its early scripts, working with Flanagan to choose the scary stories the members of the club would tell.
While The Midnight Club provides the frame story, many of the stories its members tell actually come from Pike’s other novels. Their names are in the relevant episode titles — The Wicked Heart, Gimme a Kiss, Witch, See You Later, Road to Nowhere and The Eternal Enemy.
The exterior of Brightcliffe, which features a beautiful beach and forest, was filmed in an area of Vancouver called Pitt Meadows. The hospice’s gothic exterior was based on a house in Maine that was scanned by the VFX team from Zoic Studios, who then used a mix of green screens and an on-site facade to create the set.
