The Midnight Club Takes Big Risks and Gets Satisfyingly Creepy: Review
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The post The Midnight Club Takes Big Risks and Gets Satisfyingly Creepy: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: High school senior Ilonka (Iman Benson) has her whole life in front of her, which won’t be long. When she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, and her doctors say the treatment isn’t working, she decides to spend her remaining days at Brightcliffe, a hospice care center for dying teens, where all the tenants are wrestling with their mortality while trying to enjoy however much time they have left.
But all is not as it appears at Brightcliffe, which at one point was home to a mysterious cult, and where every night the youths meet in the library to tell terrifying stories. Ilonka joins this “Midnight Club” and in this adaptation of a whole bunch of stories by Christopher Pike, soon reveals to them that she has secrets of her own, a special reason for coming to Brightcliffe, and a plan which could save one or all of their lives.
Who the Heck is Christopher Pike? No, he’s not the first captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise. That’s the pen name of author Kevin McFadden, who has written dozens of popular horror and thriller novels for YA audiences (and yes, he took that name as an homage to the first captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise).
Although his contemporary, R.L. Stine, has been adapted to film and television many times over the last few decades, the Netflix series The Midnight Club is the most prominent adaptation of any of Pike’s novels, after the TV movie Fall Into Darkness in 1996 and the short-lived series Spooksville from the early 2010s.
Producers Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong, who previously collaborated on the hit Netflix horror series The Haunting of Bly Manor, seem determined to make up for lost time. The Midnight Club is actually a lot of Pike adaptations hidden within another Pike adaptation, because the stories the “Midnight Club” tell each other — and which the show’s cast act out, like a group of repertory players — are loosely adapted from the author’s other works.
The best part of The Midnight Club is the way the scripts cleverly manipulate Pike’s tales to illuminate the inner words of the Midnight Club’s members, as they reveal hidden secrets, uncomfortable anxieties, and unexpected glimmers of hope through each violent, bizarre tale they tell. This is the rare anthology horror series where the framing device for the short stories is as good, if not better, than the tales themselves.
The Midnight Club (Netflix)
Who Is The Midnight Club? Most horror stories are about people who are dying, but in The Midnight Club they all know it, and unfortunately, the killer is nearly impossible for any of them to defeat. While there are seemingly supernatural threats at Brightcliffe, and possible violent conspiracies afoot, each of the young leads has plenty to deal with before the plot kicks in, as they struggle to live with dignity while they await an all-too-early end.
It could have been a grim backdrop for the series, but the protagonists are a lovable ensemble of characters who have every intention of living to the fullest while they still can. In addition to telling scary stories, Kevin (Igby Rigney) has a girlfriend with plans to take him to prom. Anya (Ruth Codd) is an embittered drug addict whose irritability barely conceals how much she cares about her peers. Spence (Chris Sumpter) is trying to find acceptance as a young gay man in the 1990s, even though his queerness and HIV-positive diagnosis have alienated him from his Christian family.
There’s also Natsuki (Aya Furukawa), who struggles with mental health issues, and Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota), who’s obsessed with completing his bucket list, like living long enough to play the first PlayStation. Sandra (Annarah Cymone) is profoundly religious and prone to telling stories her friends write off as “angel porn,” and Cheri (Adia) is the daughter of famous movie stars, whose anecdotes are so implausible nobody knows when she’s lying or not.
Rounding out the cast are Dr. Georgina Stanton, played by horror luminary Heather Langenkamp (A Nightmare on Elm Street), who owns and runs Brightcliffe and is probably keeping tons of secrets from her teenaged patients, and Shasta (Samantha Sloyan), a hippie next-door neighbor who is either full of red flags or a total red herring. You’ll have to watch the show to find out which.
Teen Drama vs. Teen Trauma: The Midnight Club plays like several different series and genres all sewn together. It’s a teen drama, it’s a serialized horror stories, it’s an anthology horror story. It’s got heavy ideas and emotions revolving around difficult topics like death, religion, and fanaticism. But it’s also (mostly) a PG-13-esque horror story, with an aesthetic and a tone that seems more suited to slumber parties than late-night horror marathons.
It’s only natural that some of these elements would come across better than others. The short stories the Midnight Club tell each other are mostly naive, with narrative flaws that get called out and occasionally even fixed mid-episode. The fact that most of the cast of these shorts are the Midnight Club themselves, and their friends, families, and the employees of Brightcliffe, is sometimes revealing but often distracting, especially when a “real-life character” someone has never met is playing a character in their story. The internal logic doesn’t always pan out.
The Midnight Club (Netflix)
The larger mysteries at play at Brightcliffe take turns being either intriguing or predictable, as a few of the supernatural elements of the series never reach any meaningful conclusion, while others culminate in a bit of an anti-climax. It’s as though the makers of The Midnight Club made a decision that, if they could only choose to be a great teen drama or a great horror series, they’d rather be a great teen drama.
And at its best, The Midnight Club is a solid teen drama. Remove the horror from the equation and the interpersonal stories between the cast, and their struggles with inner demons and outer turmoils, are more than enough to carry the show even if not all the scares are equal.
Face It, Generation X… You’re Old Now: The Midnight Club is a period piece, taking place in the early 1990s. It was a time when, according to this series, people already said slang words like “epic cringe” and “staycation,” and when surfing the internet was just as speedy on dial-up as it is on high-speed internet today.
It’s these kinds of distracting details that are guaranteed to make certain older audience members roll their eyes throughout parts of the show, but the show’s target demographic isn’t old fogies eager to nitpick all the period details. It’s a show for young people, about the drama and the horrors of dying young. Just because it’s set in an earlier era doesn’t mean it’s made for people who lived then.
The Verdict: The Midnight Club isn’t particularly terrifying, but it’s satisfyingly creepy. More than that, it’s unusually intense for any show — especially one catering to YA audiences — about the topics of life and death. There’s an episode halfway through the season where the gears shift dramatically, and we begin to question everything we know, and where the tales the Midnight Club tell have taken on the worst life possible for themselves. That episode is a potent piece of drama, sandwiched between sometimes goofy one-off campfire tales, teen soap subplots, and mixed-bag serialized mystery arcs.
The cast is uniformly exceptional, with Ruth Codd stealing much of the show, Chris Sumpter stealing our hearts, and Iman Benson shrewdly balancing a complex character whose good intentions can go horribly wrong. Langenkamp seems to be having an almost embarrassing amount of fun, as she wanders from one horror short to another, playing broadly drawn detectives and other amusing roles.
The Midnight Club takes big risks and most of them pay off. The big takeaway is that beneath every scary story there is a deeply personal tale about what scares the storyteller. And if you pay attention, you can get something special out of even an uneven horror yarn. Like this one.
Where to Watch: The Midnight Club is streaming now on Netflix.
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The Midnight Club Takes Big Risks and Gets Satisfyingly Creepy: Review
William Bibbiani
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