‘The Midnight Club’ Review: Mike Flanagan’s Horror Coming-Of-Ager Anthology Gets Too Sentimental About The Nature Of Storytelling

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Harry Potter” has had many imitators, but none so blatant or irredeemably over-the-top as Netflix franchise starter “The School for Good and Evil,” an extravagant YA costume show from “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig that follows two friends to an elite academy where the heroes and villains of future fairy tales are trained. The whole idea derives from a book series by Soman Chainani, though it’s obvious where it really comes from: the imagination of J.K. Rowling, who must be positively livid watching what looks like the most expensive episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” ever produced. Feig goes full camp here, casting Kerry Washington and Charlize Theron to play the decked-out divas who oversee the enchanted institution’s two sides. The former embodies Professor Dovey, a prissy headmistress in Tweety Bird-yellow threads, who’s always going on about the rules, while Theron’s evil-minded Lady Lesso takes her fashion cues from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Joined by Laurence Fishburne (as the Morpheus-like School Master), Michelle Yeoh (largely wasted as some kind of beauty instructor) and Cate Blanchett (in voice only, as the film’s self-aware narrator), these stars have been given carte blanche to chew the scenery.

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.

Lenny Kravitz is, apparently, not afraid of sharing the occasional thirst trip — especially when it could lead to a big project! The 58-year-old rocker flashes his abs in the trailer for and on Instagram, where his shirtless photos have garnered a hilarious response from his daughter, Zoe Kravitz, and even her boyfriend, Channing Tatum.In an interview with ET's Rachel Smith, Lenny jokes about the time that Zoe and Channing commented on his posts with questions about whether he intended to audition for . «Well I figured, you know, your boyfriend might give me a job,» Lenny cracks, acknowledging that he «missed the boat» on the franchise's third installment. «There's always the number four,» he jokes. Unfortunately, however, the upcoming  is expected to be the final piece of the franchise. A post shared by Lenny Kravitz (@lennykravitz)Lenny spent Wednesday evening celebrating the launch of his latest business endeavor, a partnership with the new spirit Nocheluna Sotol. The drink originates from the Chihuahuan Desert in Mexico and is harvested from the Dasylirion plant. «I tasted it and I fell in love with it,» he says.

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

The superintendent of Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District announced his retirement this week, as the community still reels from the May 24 shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers. Hal Harrell's retirement was publicly announced in a now-privatized Facebook post from his wife, Donna Goates Harrell, on Sunday night.The retiring superintendent attended Monday's school board meeting after his announcement. "I am truly grateful for your support and well wishes.

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.

“The Midnight Club,” an adaptation of the Christopher Pike novel of the same name that brings Flanagan into the realm of YA horror for the first time.

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.

Naveen Kumar What gives life value and makes it worth our daily toil? What does it mean to need another person, and what do we owe each other? It is a testament to the brilliant craft of Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living,” now on Broadway after a successful off Broadway run, that it poses these sorts of colossal questions in scenes so bracingly intimate that you might be tempted to look away were they not so utterly magnetic.  There’s writing specific characters that shimmer with universal truth, then there’s managing to capture, in the span of 100 minutes, how it feels to be alive. “Cost of Living,” which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for drama, achieves insights about the human condition by zooming in on its particulars, compelling audiences to question what we take for granted and what might happen if we didn’t. It’s a heart-opening exercise in empathy deftly suited to the form, the kind of theater that imprints on the body and lives in your bones.