‘The Midnight Club’: first episode breaks jump scares world record

Larsen Thompson is quickly taking over the entertainment industry, and we want our Just Jared readers to get an exclusive chance to get to know the quadruple threat even better.

“Bly Manor,” “Midnight Mass” and now “The Midnight Club.”Based on novels by YA horror author Christopher Pike (also an executive producer), “The Midnight Club” is set in 1990s California and follows college-bound students.Ilonka (Iman Benson) is a star student who gets a terminal-cancer diagnosis right when it feels like her whole life is ahead of her. After finding Brightcliffe online, she gets her foster dad Tim — Matt Biedel, who looks like he gets the call when David Harbour is busy — to agree to take her to the mysterious hospice for a “trial run,” like “cancer sleepaway camp,” she says.

Netflix horror series The Midnight Club has broken the Guinness World Record for the most jump scares in a single episode.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer SPOLER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched through the Season 1 finale of Netflix’s “The Midnight Club.” “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass” mastermind Mike Flanagan turned his attention to a younger audience for his new Netflix series, “The Midnight Club,” which launched Friday. The new drama concludes its 10-episode first season with just a few answers, and many more questions about the fate of Ilonka (Iman Benson) and her fellow terminally ill teens at Brightcliffe Hospice, the Paragon cult’s mysterious connection to Dr. Stanton (Heather Langenkamp), the teens’ head caregiver and owner of the hospice, what actually happened to Julia Jayne/Shasta (Samantha Sloyan) and why those elderly ghosts are haunting Ilonka and Kevin (Igby Rigney).

Note: Spoilers for the final episode of “The Midnight Club” Season 1 follow below.Fans of filmmaker Mike Flanagan’s other Netflix series may have been shocked to discover that, when it came to the Season 1 finale of “The Midnight Club,” there are a couple of huge plot threads left dangling. Indeed, this is the “Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass” creator’s first series that’s designed to be an ongoing show instead of a limited series, and in that regard the “Midnight Club” finale ending offers up a pretty massive cliffhanger.The first season of the Christopher Pike adaptation concludes with Ilonka (Iman Benson) and Kevin (Igby Rigney) finally kissing as the kids of the Midnight Club have come to some semblance of acceptance with regards to Anya’s (Ruth Codd) death and Sandra’s (Annarah Cymone) miraculous recovery.Julia Jayne (Samantha Sloyan), meanwhile, is in the wind having had her ritualistic sacrifice thwarted by Dr.

By It takes a certain kind of wisdom to know your calling in life as a child. It takes even more to then make that happen. But watch Iman Benson on screen, and it becomes so clear she knew something at age nine that most people take a lifetime to figure out: This is what she’s meant to do. The actor, now 22, has had roles on hit shows like Suits and BlackAF, but she delivers her first true breakthrough performance in Netflix’s The Midnight Club, now streaming.

Mike Flanagan is as sentimental about storytelling as he is about horror, for better and for worse. Sometimes that has led to a unique heartbeat in his work—the aching pain in his landmark Shirley Jackson adaptation “The Haunting of Hill House,” or his dedication to making us see the demons of “The Shining” in a different light with his unfairly maligned feature “Doctor Sleep.” But his latest project, co-created with Leah Fong, shows that affinity getting the better of him.

Four years after Mike Flanagan's breakout success with , the horror expert is back with a new offering, this time titled. The new show, streaming on Netflix starting Oct.

“The Midnight Club” has most of the usual tropes. There are doomed romances and devastating deaths mixed in with the harsh side effects of cancer and all five stages of grief. And as an anthology of ghost stories, “The Midnight Club” is also not too revolutionary.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Mike Flanagan has, of late, distinguished himself as one of Netflix’s signature creators and as a generational figure in the horror genre; though his past series for the streamer, including “Midnight Mass” and “The Haunting of Hill House,” have been of various quality overall and from episode to episode, they’re consistently interesting. His willingness to engage ideas with his scares sets him apart, perhaps more than it should. So it is with “The Midnight Club,” which Flanagan and Leah Fong co-created based on the work of YA novelist Christopher Pike. Here, Iman Benson plays Ilonka, a college-bound high school salutatorian who receives a diagnosis of terminal cancer. 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. What she finds, first, is a circle of ill teens who gather when the clock strikes twelve to share scary stories; it’s a mordant nihilism they share, and a sense of indulgent pleasure in the knowledge that things could be worse: They could be fighting against cosmic forces of evil.

A Guinness World Record for the most scripted jump scares in a single episode of television has a claimant. Coincidentally (well, not really), it’s a new series premiering on Netflix.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Mike Flanagan has faced his worst fear: The jump scare. The “Midnight Mass” and “Haunting of Hill House” mastermind packed 21 separate instances of the classic horror trope into the premiere of his latest Netflix series, “The Midnight Club,” a tally so high it actually breaks the Guinness World Record for “most scripted jump scares in a single television episode.” A Guinness World Record official presented Flanagan and Co. their certificate for the achievement during the “Midnight Club’s” New York Comic Con panel Thursday night, which included a preview of the premiere episode ahead of the show’s Friday launch.

Unsurprisingly, the October TV lineup is filled with horror series and adaptations of famous monsters, vampires, and corrupted men. Vampires, in particular, are having a big month, with updates to “Interview With The Vampire” and “Let the Right One In,” both getting the serialized television treatment following their pre-existing film adaptations.