If “the sounds of stories are the sounds of life,” as one of its characters reflects, The Midnight Club is positively bursting with vitality. Nested within its central narrative, of a teen girl (Iman Benson’s Ilonka) arriving at Brightcliffe hospice after a terminal cancer diagnosis, are at least a dozen others: There’s the vaguely mystical history of Brightcliffe, and the biographies of Brightcliffe’s other young residents, plus the spooky fictional tales they share around the fireplace each night as they wait for someone, finally, to make good on their pact to reach out from the other side once they’ve passed on.
Related Stories
Not all of the stories contained in The Midnight Club work equally well, and a few purposely don’t really work at all. Collectively, however, they mount a compelling case for why stories matter and why scary stories in particular do, inelegant or imperfect though they may be — and along the way, draw some jolts, a few gasps and a great many tears.
The Midnight Club
Like co-creator Mike Flanagan‘s previous series The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor (the latter of which had Midnight Club co-creator Leah Fong as producer), The Midnight Club is a literary adaptation, albeit of rather less august material — it’s based on the YA horror novels of Christopher Pike. Nevertheless, the results feel of a piece with his other handsomely mounted, emotionally driven dramas, down to the stately, probably haunted mansion and the long, searching monologues about heady topics like love, death and mortality.
Ilonka’s stubborn refusal to accept her fate drives the main action of Midnight Club‘s ten hour-long episodes, as we soon discover her true motive for coming to Brightcliffe lay in a desperate hope. Having heard rumors of a resident some decades prior who was mysteriously healed, she’s determined to reengineer the same miracle for herself. Her quest sends her grasping toward naturopathic remedies and digging deep into Brightcliffe’s hidden history of occult activity, eventually with assistance from new friends like the hippie neighbor (Samantha Sloyan) Ilonka happens upon seemingly every time she ventures into the woods surrounding the hospice.
The Midnight Club‘s setting would seem to offer a quick shortcut to profundity (if there’s any premise easier to exploit for tears than a sick kid, it’s eight of them), but Flanagan and Fong take care to avoid reducing their characters to their diagnoses. The tears, when they come, are well earned. Empathetic writing and lively performances yield personalities that pop off the screen — perhaps none more so than Ruth Codd as Anya, Ilonka’s self-described bitch of a roommate, and Chris Sumpter as Spence, a gay AIDS patient coming to terms with both his sexuality and his diagnosis. Meanwhile, Benson’s combination of stubbornness and compassion makes her an ideal anchor for the series’ aching sense of empathy.
By day, Brightcliffe’s young patients process their complicated feelings in group therapy sessions led by the warm, firm hand of Dr. Stanton (Heather Langenkamp). But it’s in the unsanctioned Midnight Club gatherings that they truly open up to one another through wild, horror-tinged fictions. Large chunks of every chapter are devoted to depicting these stories, recapturing some of the same unpredictable delight I remember from a ’90s childhood spent devouring one Pine book after another; fans of his work may be tickled to hear that though Midnight Club borrows its structure from one of his titles, many more are adapted in these flights of fancy.
Flanagan and Fong aren’t exactly subtle about the ways they reflect the predicaments of the teenagers sharing them. Through these tales, these kids get to write themselves the endings they secretly desire or fear they deserve, to work out their worries and regrets by projecting them onto ghosts or devils or time travelers. Often, they become a way to wrestle with hope, as when Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota), who’s crushing on Natsuki (Aya Furukawa), invents a sci-fi thriller about a shy geek like himself (also played Sapkota) who tries to get the girl (also played by Furukawa).
What saves the gimmick from tipping over into leaden pretension is a sense of play. The Midnight Club gleefully seizes the opportunity to delve into different styles and genres, with one chapter going so far as to recreate the grainy black-and-white palette and 4:3 aspect ratio of a classic noir — albeit one centering on a femme fatale who chews toothpicks instead of smoking cigarettes, in a reflection of her straight-laced creator Sandra (Annarah Cymone). Their casts are comprised largely of the Midnight Club themselves (with a handful of cameos from other Flanagan regulars), and their narration is regularly interrupted by listeners quick to call out an over-reliance on jump scares or rib each other over a nonsensical detail.
That these stories-within-the-story vary in quality only adds to their fun. Every wonky wig or awkward accent contributes to the sense that we’re watching a homegrown troupe put on shows that mean something to them, even if they lack the slick professionalism of a Broadway production. In The Midnight Club, storytelling is not a virtuosic solitary performance but a communal project, and tales gather meaning as characters mix their own interpretations, twists or criticisms, and eventually respond with tales of their own.
By contrast, the main narrative runs out of steam despite handsome production values. As pure horror goes, The Midnight Club is even less frightening than last year’s Midnight Mass. The terrors that do unfold at Brightcliffe can be effective in the moment — hallways that seem to transport themselves to other eras, “living shadows” that stalk the dying and sometimes seem to reach out and choke them — but feel too often like afterthoughts, tacked on to the ends of chapters that had already climaxed on some other emotional plane. Those who favor detailed explanations and tidy resolutions should be warned that The Midnight Club‘s mysteries recede rather than crest, and conclude on a final button bound to confuse more than clarify.
But that, too, feels somehow right for a project that prioritizes deeply felt emotions over cheap thrills or easy answers. Near the end of the season, Kevin (Igby Rigney), a clean-cut boy-next-door type whose serial-killer thriller has stretched over several evenings already, confesses the real reason he’s so reluctant to wrap things up: “Once people know the end, the rest of the story just fades away.” In the show’s typically meta fashion, it’s clear he’s talking about his own impending demise as well as the final chapters of his story. How touching it is that Midnight Club itself, whose characters linger in the heart after the plot has concluded, proves him wrong.
