Hi friends, Halloween is approaching and it's a great time for scary stories, so I've been spending the last couple of days with the new series "The Midnight Club" from Netflix and the talented director Mike Flanagan.
It's not unreasonable to say that his previous series The Haunting of Hill House, which turned out to be a solid family drama wrapped in a mystical horror, I rewatched twice or three times because of the "hidden" ghosts. And Midnight Mass, despite the huge amount of dialogues and monologues about religion, made a huge impression and became one of my favorite horror shows.
So, his new story once again turns out to be an unconventional horror flick and revolves around a group of teenagers dying beautifully of terminal illnesses in a gothic mansion and spending their last nights in the library by the fireplace, telling scary stories. The cardinal rule of these late-night shenanigans is that if a member of the Midnight Club dies, he must put all his energy into giving the others a sign from the "other side", but over the years the boys have never received proof of the afterlife.
Actually, the main thing in the series is not the through storyline about an inquisitive girl with a quirky name Ilonka, but the very stories that her new friends tell. There is a place for the classic horror with jumpscare moments, science fiction about time paradoxes, and even a teenage version of a noir detective, and a plot about a serial killer. Through each of these, the author talks about a narrative character, and it's very nice that the young actors within one series get several roles at once, which they handle brilliantly.
It's doubly nice that Flanagan and his colleagues didn't turn The Midnight Club into a glossy blockbuster in the style of Stranger Things or It, but stays true to the naive genre of children's horror stories told in the dark...
Very pleased with what I've seen and would love to hear what you think of the show.
Posted using CineTV