After the critical and commercial success of Haunting of The Hill House, Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass, creator Mike Flanagan and Netflix are teaming up again for a brand new horror series, called The Midnight Club.’ The series is based on the book of the same name, written by Christopher Pike.
The very brief teaser opens with an Umbrella Academy-esque house, where we a series of young adults reciting an ominous poem to the camera. As per the book, this is the Rotterdam Home, a hospice for terminally ill children, run by a mysterious doctor. It stars a group of eight teenagers who form a club to share horror stories at midnight, while they await their fate.
If you haven’t read the book, the teaser may seem a little confusing. The teenagers of The Midnight Club are reciting a verse of a macabre poem: “To those before. To those after. To those near. And to those beyond. Seen or unseen. Here but not here.” This is a reference to the plot of the main show, where the group makes a pact which entails that the first among them to die has to come back to tell the others what the afterlife is like. Of course, this goes wrong.
The show stars a young cast of Iman Benson, Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, Aya Furukawa, Annarah Cymone, William Chris Sumpter, and Sauriyan Sapkota. It’s co-created with Trevor Macy, who’s previously worked with Flanagan on projects like Hush and Gerald’s Game.
Mike Flanagan first made a name for himself with 2013’s Oculus and 2016’s Hush. He then formed a successful pairing with Netflix with three standalone shows, all of which have received widespread acclaim. Flanagan has also worked with Ewan McGregor on Doctor Sleep, a sequel to Stephen King’s The Shining.
Post The Midnight Club, Flanagan and Macy will team up again to adapt Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ which stars Mark Hamill and see the return of long time collaborators like Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel and Henry Thomas. The series which started filing last January is rumoured to come out sometime next year.
As far as Flanagan’s The Midnight Club is concerned, all episodes are scheduled to start streaming on October 7th, 2022.
( Image credits: Netflix )