The Midnight Club

While I am frequently critical of many Netflix originals these days, there's one thing that the service has gotten right, the nurturing of the career of ...

The first two were spins on the concept of the haunted house, laden with family drama and introspection. Fans of his past work will also be glad to know that previous cast members like Rahul Kohli and Zach Gilford are set to reappear. I don’t know if The Midnight Club is destined to shoot up to the top of Netflix’s charts to unseat Dahmer, as that show is a monster (in more ways than one), but it’s been clear that Netflix recognizes the value in their relationship with Flanagan, and they keep letting him do whatever he wants. Here’s the synopsis: One night they make a pact that the first one to succumb to their disease is responsible for communicating with the others from beyond the grave. Flanagan started in horror movies, and you may have seen Oculus or Hush around a decade ago.

Netflix's latest Mike Flanagan horror effort The Midnight Club has a charming YA sensibility but not enough scares.

While The Midnight Club has some solid one-off tales within, there’s too much bloat and not enough story to recommend it to anyone beyond fans of the book series or Flanagan faithfuls. It almost feels like the show forgets that it was pitched as a horror series and remembers mid-episode, throwing out the same jump scare over and over to appease critics like myself looking for something spooky. Flanagan is still a compelling storyteller but I’m not sure I’ll be attending more meetings of The Midnight Club. The mystery does have one big reveal, but viewers will see it coming from a mile away. Young viewers likely won’t care, but anyone who was around during the ‘90s will bristle at the inaccuracies and on-the-nose needle drops. The adult members of the cast are more uniformly impressive, including Inside Brightcliffe, the young residents meet nightly to tell scary stories as a means of processing the grim realities of their situations. Obviously a cast full of dying kids feels like a shortcut for emotional resonance, but Flanagan isn’t a surface-level storyteller. After [The Haunting of Hill House](https://www.denofgeek.com/the-haunting-of-hill-house/), [The Haunting of Bly Manor](https://www.denofgeek.com/the-haunting-of-bly-manor/), and [Midnight Mass](https://www.denofgeek.com/midnight-mass/), Flanagan’s house style has crystalized. For instance, a noir story is given extra oomph by being shot in black and white and given a 4:3 aspect ratio. That said, there are some impressive performances within the teenage cast, especially Codd, who transforms the bitchy Anya from an annoying grouch to the heart of the show. Several of the stories told are adapted from Pike’s other novels.

Cults. Ghosts. Sacrificial rituals. Midnight meetings. Ley lines and miracles. Death lurks around every corner at Brightcliffe Hospice, where terminally ill ...

As in Midnight Mass, Samantha Sloyan is intriguingly suspicious as a woman who sets up camp near to Brightcliffe in a bid to leech some of its healing properties, and each of the Midnight Club members takes centre stage as they reveal more about how they came to be at Brightcliffe over the 10 plodding episodes. Most of the drama (and therefore scares) comes from these, which are played out by the same actors who play the boarders of Brightcliffe. Here, we have 10 hour-long episodes, each of which meander along to an exciting, often scary, cliffhanger only for the momentum to drop by the next instalment. [Midnight Mass](https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/midnight-mass-netflix-review-mike-flanagan-1217012) and the terrifying [Haunting of…](https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/the-haunting-of-hill-house-netflix-horror-halloween-2018-stephen-king-210204) franchise. More importantly, she learns of a past patient who walked out of the hospice completely cured and hopes for the same good luck. But mostly they’re a dull distraction from the action happening at Brightcliffe.

Think of this as a gateway drug for potential new horror fans, young people thinking about death in a new way for maybe the first time.

It must have been daunting to consider adapting a book about kids telling stories without adding all kinds of other material, but the stuff about a former patient who may have lived and cult members in the woods is the least compelling here. It's also interesting to learn that most of Ilonka’s adventures at Brightcliffe are the creation of Flanagan and Fong and not from the source. [Igby Rigney](/cast-and-crew/igby-rigney)), a potential love interest who tells a multi-episode story about a serial killer that gives the show some of its most striking imagery and Anya ( [Ruth Codd](/cast-and-crew/ruth-codd)), Ilonka’s bitter but fierce roommate. They’re forced to come to terms with the impossible—that all of their dreams will end early. Foundationally, the show becomes about how and why we tell stories to process the real world. Think of this as a gateway drug for potential new horror fans, young people thinking about death in a new way for maybe the first time.

Horror genius Mike Flanagan's latest Netflix series The Midnight Club has finally landed on the streamer, but who's in the cast of the creepy show?

Who is Spencer? Who is Amesh? The cast is rounded out by a host of Midnight Mass favourites. Dr Stanton is the mysterious doctor who runs the hospice. Who is Sandra? Who is Dr Georgina Stanton? Kevin is another member of the Midnight Club as well as a former high school athlete. Patient Cheri is the eccentric daughter of Hollywood actors (or so she reckons). The Midnight Club is Codd’s acting debut. Who is Ilonka? She’s a lower-leg amputee wheelchair user from Ireland, and is one of the more rebellious patients. She’s also set to star in Netflix’s upcoming The Fall of the House of Usher.

Mike Flanagan's The Midnight Club ends with a shocking twist that calls into question the identity of Dr Georgina Stanton, founder of Brightcliffe Hospice.

[subscribe now](http://radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription?utm_term=evergreen-article) and get the next 12 issues for only £1. [Sign up for Netflix from £6.99 a month](https://www.netflix.com/gb/). It takes some piecing together, but it appears that Dr Georgina Stanton is actually the daughter of Paragon founder Regina Ballard, who infamously staged a ritual in 1940 that cost the lives of 12 members of her collective. Regina laments to Julia Jayne, a terminally ill girl who tracks her down, that she was "so close" and "undone" by her own flesh and blood. The Midnight Club season 1 ended on a shocking cliffhanger, as it was revealed that Dr Georgia Stanton possibly isn't the philanthropic soul she had been depicted as across the show's run. *SPOILERS FOR THE MIDNIGHT CLUB* [Fantasy](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/) coverage or visit our [TV Guide](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/tv-listings/) to see what's on tonight. Netflix is also available on [Sky Glass](https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=radiotimes-1718815&awinmid=11005&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sky.com%2Fglass) and [Virgin Media Stream](https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=radiotimes-1718815&awinmid=6399&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.virginmedia.com%2Ftv%2Fstreaming). This would explain why Dr Stanton (aka Athena), who we learn in flashback was born in 1924, is in her mid-50s when we meet her in The Midnight Club, whereas she should actually be in her 70s at that time. She is referring to the actions of her daughter, known only by the pseudonym Athena, who called the police on the Paragon and helped its youngest members escape on the night of her mother's sickening sermon. The aim of the sacrificial ceremony was to extend her life, but in a flashback in the season finale, this is revealed not to have worked. [The Midnight Club](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/midnight-club-release-date-netflix/), including Dr Stanton's connection to the nightmarish death cult known as The Paragon.

Mike Flanagan's latest Netflix series "The Midnight Club" takes place at a teen hospice.

But even this adult admired “The Midnight Club” as a relatively complete example of the best of Flanagan’s approach throughout his Netflix work — using horror as a way to probe the worst things that might happen to somebody, arriving at a place of curiosity and compassion about grief and loss. (And, more so than on “Stranger Things,” adults are a glancing and occasional presence, with Heather Langenkamp and Zach Gilford playing, respectively, the founding doctor and the nurse practitioner of the hospice.) Ilonka is both a star student and an idealist; she researches Brightcliffe, a facility to which her foster father can take her to be placed into hospice, and holds in reserve a secret hope that there will, there, be a miracle cure for her.