Across the three horror miniseries that Mike Flanagan created for Netflix in the last five years — The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass — the filmmaker has paired classic spooky stories with a deeper exploration of subjects like grief and faith. His storytelling may fit squarely within the “monster as trauma metaphor†cliché in recent popular horror (and his interviews do sometimes skew pretentious, insistent as he is on distancing himself from horror tropes), yet I’ve always admired Flanagan’s unapologetic sincerity.
The Midnight Club, adapted from a novel by Christopher Pike, looks to both maintain that sincerity and add an edge of self-awareness. It’s a series about terminally ill young adults, as ripe for tear-jerking as Flanagan’s other shows. But it’s also more consciously about the writing of horror stories; about what makes them scary. And while it looks to be telling an ongoing serialized story about a particular set of characters, it comes with an anthology-series hook that will allow it to tell fun episodic side stories.
“The Final Chapter†opens in Sacramento, California, in 1994, where salutatorian Ilonka Pollock is savoring her final months with her foster dad, Tim, before heading off to the dorms at Stanford. She’s a bookworm and rule follower, but she’s excited to break out of her comfort zone upon graduation. She and her friend Lauren are already scoping out college parties. A place where you can both rant for hours about your favorite sci-fi and meet cute boys? It seems idyllic.
But then Ilonka coughs up blood one night, and before long she’s been diagnosed with papillary thyroid carcinoma, her college plans ruined. Nine months later, while her friend is experiencing a brand-new world where everything actually matters, Ilonka is trapped in a hospital bed for her 18th birthday. And there’s no sign of improvement: The tumors in her lungs didn’t respond to chemo and she’s officially terminal. She could make it another year, but likely not much longer than that.
Unwilling to accept that this could really be the last year of her life, Ilonka combs the web for stories of people who survived thyroid cancer. She discovers the story of Julia Jayne, a 17-year-old who was cured during her stay at Brightcliffe Hospice in 1968 — a story that inspires Ilonka to enroll in the fully funded program herself, looking for a miracle.
It’s clear that something about Brightcliffe is strange and potentially dangerous from that first Yahoo! search; Ilonka is already experiencing unsettling visions and déjà vu. To us, everything looks like a giant blinking sign warning her to turn back now. But Ilonka isn’t put off. She’s already gotten the worst prognosis she could imagine; for her, a supernatural solution might actually be the main attraction. If the science isn’t there yet to save her, why not try magic?
After Ilonka and Tim arrive at Brightcliffe, “The Final Chapter†spends most of its time familiarizing us with the basic history of the place and introducing us to its current inhabitants. It’s run by Dr. Georgina Stanton (the legendary Heather Langenkamp), who bought it in 1966 after the house cycled through a few different owners, including a religious commune called the Paragon. For now, Stanton comes across as genuinely altruistic, with a real desire to make these young adults comfortable in the final months of their lives. Having lost a son herself, she dislikes the language of battle commonly used when discussing illness; talk of fighting cancer may be comforting on a surface level, but it unfairly treats death like a failure. “Brightcliffe isn’t about battles; it’s about permission to leave the battlefield,†she tells Ilonka and Tim. “We aren’t about a fight, and it certainly isn’t losing a battle. Every living day here is a win.â€
On a tour of Brightcliffe, and later at dinner, Ilonka gets to know the seven young adults staying there. There’s Kevin (leukemia, four months at Brightcliffe), the young man Ilonka already met outside after briefly glimpsing him in visions. There’s Spence (five months), the friendly guy who gives her the tour. We also meet class-clown Amesh (glioblastoma, two months), quiet Natsuki (ovarian cancer, three months), pathological storyteller Cheri (three months), and old-timers Sandra (lymphoma) and Anya (bone cancer), both six months.
Besides Igby Rigney and Annarah Cymone, both of whom appeared in Midnight Mass and appear as Kevin and Sandra, most of the young cast is made up of relative newcomers. But there’s a lot of promise here; so far I’m especially intrigued by Ruth Codd as Ilonka’s roommate, Anya, who brings a welcome edge and amusing cynicism to an otherwise pretty friendly group dynamic. Anya’s memories of Rachel, her roommate before Ilonka, tease a deeper lore we’ll undoubtedly explore in future episodes; Rachel was fascinated by the occult toward the end of her life, even leaving a pentagram drawing on the floor beneath the bed that now belongs to Ilonka. And in her final days, she said she felt a shadow approaching her — perhaps the same shadow we see in the final moments of the episode, drifting down the hallway after Ilonka.
Lights are out at 10 p.m. at Brightcliffe, but Ilonka catches Anya sneaking out at midnight on her first night there. She follows her to the library, where the gang is meeting up to tell scary stories. This is the titular Midnight Club: a group established before any of these eight were even at Brightcliffe. It’s a space for storytelling, to see if it’s possible to scare the shit out of a bunch of kids who stare death in the eye every day. But there’s also a secret pact: They’ve agreed that whomever dies first will reach out from the other side to warn everyone else what to expect. Nobody has seen a definitive sign from beyond yet, but something tells me that won’t be true for long.
On a meta level, The Midnight Club seems to be Flanagan’s way of commenting on horror tropes. The first story we see belongs to Natsuki, who picks up where she left off with Ren (played by William Chris Sumpter and seemingly imagined in her mind as a version of Spence). It starts off eerie, with Ren stumbling upon an unfamiliar block and noticing faces watching him from all the windows. But the atmosphere dissipates quickly when the dreamy repetition of one girl’s “Are you lost?†turns into a nonstop series of jump scares, with her screaming face appearing wherever Ren turns.
Flanagan has a lot of fun here referencing the tropes he tries to avoid, especially with the hilarious shot of the girl appearing in the foreground to scream into the camera. (The second sentence on his Wikipedia page even identifies a “lack of reliance on jump scares.â€) You get the sense that he’s articulating his own philosophy of horror through the characters, like when Spence interrupts Natsuki’s story to chide her, “Anyone can bang pots and pans behind someone’s head. That’s not scary; it’s just startling. And it’s lazy as fuck.†Natsuki even ends the story with a silly fake-out, throwing a cat into the scene from the shadows instead of an actual monster. (“Did you just fucking black-cat scare us?†Spence says. “You do that first, not at the end.â€)
The second story of the night belongs to Ilonka, who is required to share something for initiation. She tells the mostly true tale of Julia Jayne, the girl whose tumors miraculously shrunk and disappeared after she vanished for a week while at Brightcliffe. In Ilonka’s telling of the story, Julia was hyperfixated on her own likely expiration date: a year, at most, from her initial diagnosis. But whatever happened to her during her absence, she came back changed — no longer aware of her own death date but forever cursed to know everyone else’s.
“It ain’t easy, you know? Scaring someone who’s already been given the worst news they’ll ever get.†That’s how Anya explains the appeal of the Midnight Club to Ilonka. But on a deeper level, it works as a statement of purpose for The Midnight Club. How do you make the audience fear for your characters when they know from the outset they’re all likely to die in the next year anyway? The answer, of course, is that you remind us there are worse things than death. Perhaps Julia Jayne found that out herself.
Scary Stories
• Early in the episode, Ilonka says this about the worst-case scenario for her cancer: “Talking about it is the best way to make sure it doesn’t happen, isn’t it?†I wonder if that has a deeper meaning when it comes to the series, on either a plot level or just a thematic level; this whole show centers on people “talking about it.â€
• When Ilonka’s story opens on a young woman who finds out she’s dying, Anya immediately interrupts, “Oh fuck off.†Spence hilariously explains, “We try not to do that here. It’s a little masturbatory.†It’s almost like a reassurance that the Midnight Club stories won’t usually be cut-and-dried character memoirs.
• Ilonka’s visions include a shadowy hooded figure at the head of the Midnight Club table, so this room will clearly have more significance than just as a meeting place.