Inspired by the young adult novel of the same name by Soman Chainani, the latest from Paul Feig, “The School for Good and Evil,” is a major departure for the director most known for his riotous comedies like “Spy” and “Bridesmaids“.
07.10.2022 - 17:41 / thewrap.com
“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.
It’s like a YA “Black Mirror” mixed with executive producer Mike Flanagan’s usual fare (he directs the first two episodes and wrote or co-wrote most of the season), with twists that most savvy viewers will see coming. But when you put those two things together — dying kids telling ghost stories — that’s when a show becomes something magical. And there is definitely a magic to “The Midnight Club.”The series is based on the 1994 book by Christopher Pike and tells the story of a group of teens who live in an old house converted to a hospice home.
They’re all dying of various cancers and other ailments, and most kids aren’t there for more than six months or so. To keep themselves entertained and distracted, a small faction of them meet every night at midnight to tell each other scary stories. The stories play out on screen, and the kids in the Midnight Club play all the characters, allowing for a new short film from a different genre to play out in the context of each episode.
The show starts with the arrival of Ilonka (Iman Benson), a newly diagnosed teen who has come to this place with a mission after hearing of a former patient who was cured of her terminal illness. Ilonka is not here to die. She’s here to live, by any means necessary.
Inspired by the young adult novel of the same name by Soman Chainani, the latest from Paul Feig, “The School for Good and Evil,” is a major departure for the director most known for his riotous comedies like “Spy” and “Bridesmaids“.
Zoe Saldana and Reese Witherspoon have teamed up for a new limited series on Netflix!
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have contradicted themselves when comparing Harry's upcoming memoir with the couple's multi-million pound Netflix show, a source has claimed.Their hotly-anticipated docuseries, which is said to tell the "love story" between Harry, 38, and Meghan, 41, is said to have left some producers "confused during filming" According to PageSix, some of the couples statements in the docuseries are said to "contradict" those of the one's made in Harry's yet-to-be-released book. “A lot in the show contradicted what Harry has written, so that was an issue,” a senior Netflix source revealed.
“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.
mammoth launch of “Dahmer,” “The Watcher” adaptation drains all the potential relatability and genuine terror out of the source material. With a subtler hand, and a much shorter runtime, a film could have explored the rich themes of the dark side of upward mobility and the erosion of civility among neighbors while serving up subtle but real scares, toying with the idea that the titular letter-writer could be any smiling neighbor at the grocery store.The neighbors in Murphy’s “The Watcher” wouldn’t be even remotely recognizable in the real world, so we get none of that all-too-believable dread.
With the release of the Ryan Murphy-produced true-crime series “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”, family members of some of the notorious serial killer’s victims are expressing their displeasure with the dramatization.
“The Midnight Club” (which is currently streaming), but his next Netflix series is another first for him – in the entirely opposite direction.The “Haunting of Hill House” and “Doctor Sleep” filmmaker just wrapped production this summer on a limited series adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and when TheWrap spoke with Flanagan about “Midnight Club,” he couldn’t contain his excitement for fans to see “Usher.”“It’s crazy. It is unlike anything I’ve ever done, but in the other direction,” he said.
Netflix series about the serial killer.Speaking to The Guardian, Shirley Hughes said that she hadn’t seen all of Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which focused one of its 10 episodes on her son. However, she concluded that the events depicted “didn’t happen like that,” before questioning how such a show came to be made.“I don’t see how they can do that,” Hughes said.
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.
Netflix thriller series The Midnight Club has broken a world record for jump scares.Based on the book series by Christopher Pike, the new show has been developed by the team behind The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor.After the 10-episode show debuted on Friday (October 7), its first episode has been named by the Guinness Book Of World Records as the single television episode with the most amount of jump scares.Talking to Deadline about the new record, as well as his past hatred of the technique, Flanagan said: “My whole career I completely shit on jump scares as a concept, and I wanted to make sure it was pinned to me, too, as much as it is to the show, to Netflix, and all of us who have inflicted this on everyone.“Now, I have my name in the Guinness Book of World Records for jump scares, which means next time I get the note, I can say, ‘You know, as the current world record holder for jump scares, I don’t think we need one here.’”An official synopsis for The Midnight Club reads: “At a manor with a mysterious history, the 8 members of the Midnight Club meet each night at midnight to tell sinister stories – and to look for signs of the supernatural from the beyond.
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.
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.