Midnight Club EPs Mike Flanagan & Trevor Macy on Jumpscares, the Humor in Horror, and the Club’s Legacy
Photo courtesy of Netflix
Netflix’s new spooky series The Midnight Club arrived on the streaming site last Friday, and though it is Mike Flanagan’s latest contribution to the genre, it is nothing like anything we’ve ever seen from our favorite horror king. Co-created by Leah Fong, the story follows eight terminally ill teens living at Brightcliffe Hospice who sneak into the library every midnight to exchange ghost stories and look for signs from the world after death.
During a press breakfast at the Netflix offices last Thursday, Flanagan and executive producer Trevor Macy chatted with journalists about The Midnight Club, adapting Christopher Pike’s work, and what it was like building different characters, stories, genres, and more.
Based on Pike’s 1994 novel of the same name, The Midnight Club is a sharp contrast from Flanagan’s previous Netflix works (The Hauntings, Midnight Mass) in that it’s his first YA series. That didn’t stop him from adapting the larger, more serious themes that make his shows so wildly popular, but rather allowed him to lean into them. “Something I learned from Pike was that he always included themes in his books that felt very adult,” said Flanagan. “He didn’t pull his punches with violence, with heavy things that kids are really thinking about. Intense bullying, suicide, sex, drugs—all of that was fair game in the Pike world. One of the things that my contemporaries and I loved about the books was that he wasn’t sugarcoating things. So while there was always a sense of bearing that younger audience in mind, we were also very careful not to condescend to them or try to police the kinds of things or places the show would go.”
“He treats his protagonists with more respect than a lot of YA authors do today,” echoed Macy. “We tried to keep that ethos top of mind for the series. The show lends itself to that because they’re going through the worst thing anyone can ever go through, and if you don’t treat it with respect, what do we do?”
Flanagan and his writing team used Pike’s original work as a launching pad to express as much of themselves into the characters as possible, inventing and reinventing arcs that felt universal for an audience of all ages. “There were different things about our high school years that became very important,” he explained. “We talked about the types of people we were in high school, the things we were afraid of in high school, and finding characters who could kind of hold on to that. I identify the most with Amesh myself, but I had writers in the room who were like, ‘I was Spence,’ you know, ‘I was Cheri; I still am Cheri.’ We were a roomful of kids who weren’t the cool kids in high school, and there was a lot of opportunity for us to mine that and to kind of pour that in.”
Netflix also secured the rights to 28 of Pike’s other works, which gave Flanagan and his team creative freedom to adapt different stories into different episodes, including titles such as Witch, The Wicked Heart, Road to Nowhere, and more. The story-within-a-story format allowed The Midnight Club an enormous playground to bend genres and experiment, whether it be James Cameron-inspired sci-fi or 1940s black-and-white film noir. The pilot episode includes an homage to ‘90s Japanese horror, and Flanagan used that as a platform to air out his grievances about why he doesn’t like to use jumpscares.
“I hate [jumpscares] because I feel like it’s very easy to walk up behind somebody and just smash things,” Flanagan said. To him, there’s a stark difference between being scared and being startled, and he decided the best way to run the trope to the ground was to include every possible type he could think of. The end product? 21 jumpscares in the show’s first episode (including the dumb throw-a-cat-across-the-screen scare), breaking the Guinness world record for most jumpscares in one episode of television.