The Midnight Club

Based on the 1994 book of the same name by Christopher Pike, creators Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong's "The Midnight Club" primarily focuses on Ilonka (Iman.

In fact, Rel has been created by Christopher in the future, and he has arrived in the past for a purpose that he doesn’t remember. So, Christopher (the version from the future, of course) needs to kill Rel and ensure that his vision of fearless humanity stays intact. Through that, he learns that the only way to stop humanity from devolving into a race of emotionless robots is if Christopher never goes into robotics and stops seeing humans as machines that can be fixed. Natsuki says that she made it out of the car, and her mother found her in that horrifying state (which reminded her of how Natsuki’s father died by suicide). The rest of the Midnight Club also gets to bid goodbye to a dying Anya by crafting a story of how she marries Rhett and lives in a place in the suburbs where her neighbors are all members of the club. When Christopher goes away to his mother’s place, Rel uses the VCR and learns that Christopher and his mother are about to be murdered. This does lead Imani to the love of her life (Kevin), but it also shows her that she’s going to lose him during a robbery. When Imani’s mother dies while trying to save a girl, she goes searching for answers in the dark of the night (something that witches like her aren’t supposed to do). This practice of crafting a story around what one wants to do for a fellow Midnight Clubber is visible in Ilonka’s story about Imani (Ilonka) and her witch mother, who have healing powers and the ability to see the future. Because that’s a sign of your self-awareness, and you can work on that with the help of others. Hence, she makes a pact with the devil (Stanton) and gives birth to the mirror version of herself. However, his mood is lifted when he bumps into Vincent (Rahul Kohli), and he tells Luke to do a demo run of his new game and succeed in it.

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for The Midnight Club season 1 on Netflix. If you binged The Midnight Club — created by the showrunner who brought us The ...

The ending of season 1, however, was left open, with a clear hint that more could be explored at Brightcliffe. But that also means you're probably eagerly awaiting a season 2 announcement, given how much the first season leaves unanswered even as it tells a complete, moving narrative. But this was very much designed to continue.

This month the Flanaverse expands with the writer-director's Netflix series, The Midnight Club, adapted from the 1994 YA novel of the same name by prolific ...

The brilliance of The Midnight Club is owed to the diversity in front of and behind the camera. The Midnight Club is a beautiful, haunting story about loss, life, faith, fear, love, sadness, and hope. She loves naps, Paul Rudd, and binge-watching the latest series with her two gorgeous pups – Harry and DeVito. The majority of the cast is made up of exciting young talent. The members have a pact that if/when one of them dies, that person will make contact from the other side. The Newton Brothers (Midnight Mass) use ’90s grunge classics to set the overall tone for a series about dying teenagers who have reasonably intense emotions that go beyond regular angst, with each teen’s stories having their own atmospheric sounds. When you live on in the heart of someone else, you live on. Given the heavy subject matter, the story is naturally bleak, but there are still moments of levity. [Netflix](https://youtu.be/elD22FT9pnU?t=146), “We’re all just stories in the end. Similar to how Bly Manor incorporated other stories by Henry James, The Midnight Club also includes other Pike works like The Wicked Heart, Road to Nowhere, and Witch. But as a generally optimistic young woman with a penchant for planning, she does her own research and finds Brightcliffe, a place where young people have more agency over how they spend the rest of their time. Decades ago, one cancer patient was miraculously cured on hospice grounds, and Ilonka hopes the same can happen to her.

There's a general misunderstanding that having a jump scare makes the movie or the show scary. And it doesn't, I think. We had 21 jump scares in this pilot, I ...

And you’re right that having this record, to me, is something that I think is really funny and something that I’m also really grateful for and I think is really fun.” “More often than not, the note that I would get is ‘More scares, faster, sooner.’ There’s a sense that horror fans will abandon a project unless you put a jolt every three or four minutes,” he said. The man behind “Oculus,” “Doctor Sleep” and the Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “Midnight Mass” has made a career out of terrifying audiences. The noise you hear right after the scream in the theater is a laugh, and once the audience is laughing, if you’ve been trying to create tension and foreboding, that’s gone,” Flanagan continued. And Flanagan is not the biggest fan of this particular trope. And while it gives you a bit of a release and a jolt and you still might hear the communal laugh afterwards, it’s a desperate laugh.”

In the new Netflix series, The Midnight Club, a group of terminally ill teens gather each night to tell scary stories to one another.

[Netflix version of The Midnight Club](https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-midnight-club-ending-explained-spoiler-involvement-paragon-cult-imply.html/), Flanagan added a few characters to the story, and that includes Amesh. After the group disperses for the night, Natsuki tells Amesh that his story “rang a little hollow for her” because Luke and Becky never got together. They returned to the past to figure out how to keep Becky’s boyfriend from creating the software that ultimately brings about the end of the world. Plus, something changed in Becky’s boyfriend too, and the two become friends. He frequents a video game story in his town because of his crush on the girl who works at the counter named Becky. He finally learns the only way to win is not to play. Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota) tells his story the night after the group celebrates him living past his doctors’ expected death date. [Netflix](https://www.cheatsheet.com/tag/netflix/) series, The Midnight Club, a group of terminally ill teens gather each night to tell scary stories to one another. For Amesh’s, Flanagan uses a bit from See You Later and The Starlight Crystal. Popular young adult author Christopher Pike inspired showrunner [Mike Flanagan’s version of the series](https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/mike-flanagan-brings-90s-teen-horror-novel-life-the-midnight-club-heres-release-date-trailer.html/), but Flanagan made some slight changes. One of the most noticeable changes of Flanagan’s includes the stories the group at Brightcliffe tells each night. Most of the stories the group tells have an underlying meaning.

Mike Flanagan's latest Netflix series, 'The Midnight Club,' may or may not return for Season 2. But 'The Fall of the House of Usher' will be out next year.

He recently tweeted that he wrapped filming on Usher, which marked the end of essentially three straight years—and four shows—in a row of filming in Vancouver. If we get Midnight Club Season 2, or Something Is Killing the Children, or anything else from Mr. He's also got another series already in the pipeline, presumably for next year around this same time (more on that below), so if there was to be a Season 2, it would likely come a little further down the line. The show seemingly could continue—or it could just be a one-and-done, like most of Flanagan's other work. In the closing moments of Season 1, Dr. Flanagan, who first worked with Netflix on the Stephen King adaptation feature film Gerald's Game before pivoting to the shows The Haunting of Hill House,

Fans of Netflix's "Flanaverse" eagerly awaited Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong's take on The Midnight Club. Just like with Midnight Mass and other Flanaverse ...

Instead of shallow or stereotypical characters there to experience a plot, The Midnight Club puts most of its emphasis on the characters. In The Midnight Club, ghosts represent hope for an afterlife as well as being a source of fear. While there are some hints that Julia, aka Shasta, may not be as friendly as she seems, Ilonka believes her to be a friend until the climax of the first season. However, even when faced with death, the members of The Midnight Club do their best to be there for one another. The main characters in The Midnight Club are residents of Brightcliffe, a hospice facility for the terminally ill. The Midnight Club doesn't make any death seem like the fault of any character. Horror movies often need to make characters utterly oblivious to their surroundings for the sake of the plot. The Midnight Club keeps the trope of worrying about the characters but flips it on its head. The Midnight Club completely subverts this trope by showing the opposite. However, The Midnight Club takes this trope in a very different direction. The show doesn't completely do away with horror tropes, but instead inverts many of them to create a unique piece of horror fiction. Just like with Midnight Mass and other Flanaverse entries, viewers are in for a lot of heavy emotions and deep conversations, something the horror genre isn't exactly known for.

The iconic horror showrunner reveals how some of his repertory cast made it into 'The Midnight Club' — even if you can't see them.

[The Midnight Club](https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/midnight-club-ending-explained-season-2-mike-flanagan) is intensely steeped in the [Flanagan-verse](https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/midnight-mass-review-netflix). According to Flanagan, there are some more obvious easter eggs — the Lasser glass from Oculus, of course, shows up — but there are also references to Flanagan’s favorite works. “We snuck a Die Hard poster into the frame, just for one shot,” Flanagan says. Could one of them even be the eerie voice of Dusty’s mom in Kevin’s Midnight Club story? Are they the ghostly voice of the apparitions Ilonka keeps seeing or a voice on the other end of a phone? It grapples with the [concept of death](https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/midnight-masss-demonic-ending-explained) and how it affects the living.

The wait is over. The Midnight Club has finally arrived on Netflix! The highly anticipated horror mystery-thriller was released on the streaming giant on ...

Though we can’t be 100% certain as the 22-year-old actress may be dating someone privately and keeping her relationship out of the limelight. While it’s certain that Iman Benson was born to play the role of 18-year-old thyroid cancer patient Ilonka in Netflix’s The Midnight Club, the actress has proven her star power in multiple roles. [Dating Celebs](https://www.datingcelebs.com/who-is-iman-benson-dating/), the young actress is currently not attached to or dating anyone.

The Midnight Club's cliffhanger ending raised the stakes for Mark Flanagan's Netflix horror TV show as the residents of Brightcliffe Manor faced death.

[Mark Flanagan's Netflix horror show](https://screenrant.com/mike-flanagan-horror-netflix-shows-ranked/) demonstrates this truth through the recurring hourglass symbols, and it is telling that so many of the adults encountered by Ilonka and her friends are tied to the Paragon cult. The restoration of the statue is the sign the young Stanton's hourglass tattoo hints at her greatest secret, that she too is working to overturn death - but her own death, not the deaths of the teenagers in her charge. The Midnight Club implies these are the Eaters of Years, spirits who consume the lost years of young people who are dying. In another supernatural twist, however, the cliffhanger ending of The Midnight Club reveals the mysterious specters Ilonka and Kevin have been seeing appear to be the Freelans - the couple who first built the Freelan Estate, the building now known as Brightcliffe Manor. The cliffhanger ending of The Midnight Club season 1 revealed Georgina Stanton, founder of Brightcliffe Manor, also lost her hair and has that hourglass symbol on the back of her neck. [characters of The Midnight Club](https://screenrant.com/midnight-club-cast-characters-cameos-guide/) wrestle with their own mortality in different ways. It's a powerful moment, transforming how every one of the teenagers views their fates. As chilling and spectacular as these events may be, though, The Midnight Club's ending is actually dedicated to the aftermath of that fateful night. Believing the Paragon rituals responsible for her remission when she was a teenager, Julia tricked Ilonka into participating in a sacrificial ritual that would have killed her in an attempt to restore Julia's own life. Ballard was the sole survivor, found hairless and with a tattoo on the back of her neck. Ilonka's journey of discovery really began when she discovered the diary of a girl named Athena, daughter of Regina Ballard - the founder of the Paragon cult.

Seven things to know about the series from the show's creator: adapting Christopher Pike's work has been a life-long dream, it's a YA genre title, ...

So, for my whole career, I’ve completely just shat on jump scares as a concept, and now it is pinned to me as much as it is to the show and 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, As the current world record holder in jump scares, I can tell you I don’t think we need one here.” “There are some cameos in the show that are really fun and really hard to find,” he said. Well, it is definitely in The Midnight Club but as he admitted to the room, the Easter eggs are there but require some extra attention to discover. He refers to these tales as “B stories” and the inclusion of them in the series involved some deep research and character development. “This was designed to be ongoing,” he continued. And through the years, no one attempted to adapt any of Pike’s extensive library of 80 books to television or film. That idea that a scary book was going to kind of get me right in the heart — I hadn’t bumped into that before, and it was pretty revelatory.” “There was one book in particular called The Midnight Club that made me cry as a teenager. But, as he explained, it was Christopher Pike’s books that first revealed the emotional power of storytelling to his young mind. But for Flanagan — who turned to his 11-year-old son Rigby for creative input on his latest — tapping into Pike’s work isn’t just a creative pivot for him, but it’s also a life-long dream come true, as the co-creator of the series explained during a press breakfast at Netflix’s New York offices during New York Comic Con. The 10-episode first season is now streaming and follows a group of terminally ill teenagers who meet every night to tell each other scary stories as a way of confronting life’s issues and their own mortality.

Two midnight stories told early make way for the show's most streamlined, high-stakes, moving storyline yet. A recap of season one, episode six of Mike ...

In general, there’s a palpable sense of love in this core group dynamic, and that makes this ensemble enjoyable to watch, even when the show’s pace is a little too leisurely and its emotional beats a tad too treacly. Cancer may not be about winning or losing, but in light of Ilonka’s healing fantasy and her difference of philosophy with Stanton over the course of this episode, failing Anya feels like the biggest loss of all. Each of them draws blood and leaves a bloody thumbprint on Anya’s forehead, leading to a small but very moving moment when Spence assures her, “You know that you can’t get it this way, right?” (alluding to his AIDS diagnosis) and she replies, full of love, “I wouldn’t care even if I could.” The ritual Shasta suggests requires the blood of five women, like the Five Sisters, so she offers her own in addition to Ilonka, Sandra, Natsuki, and Cheri’s. “I’m waiting on cancer with a Molotov and a machete,” she says, and in the moment, you can get swept up in her determination. Ultimately, your body’s reaction to a virus has little to do with bravery or toughness, and there’s little you can do to swing the odds in your favor outside of finding good medical care. Fortunately or unfortunately, she runs into the devil on her shoulder, Shasta, who uses a silly bug metaphor to “disprove” Stanton’s gravity thesis and offers to help Ilonka try to heal Anya. She urgently asks if there was anything weird when Ilonka arrived; Ilonka did, in fact, see a message written in sheets on the floor reading “DON’T” after sneaking Anya to the basement. Stanton might as well be the scryer in that moment, because by the end of the episode, it’s possible Ilonka has done exactly what Stanton cautioned her against. But before Ilonka can finish her story, Anya passes out right on the desk and the story is dropped entirely. Her vision threatens to come true when they pull up to the familiar liquor store; she convinces Ben not to go in but Scottie (Anya) goes instead. But since both stories are told at the beginning of the episode, getting them out of the way early makes for interesting pacing, with the meat of the plot of this installment going to the most streamlined, high-stakes, moving storyline yet.

In Episode 2 of The Midnight Club, Anya is the one with the story. We recap “The Two Danas.”

The vision once again caused her to faint, and she awakens on the ground with Kevin standing over her, making sure she’s okay. Ilonka knocks on the bathroom door, and Anya tells her to go on without her. Kevin covers for Ilonka so that she can escape with the file, but before she can run away, she has another vision. Tonight, Anya is the one with the story, which she names “The Two Danas.” The story is about a girl from Ireland (who is also played by Ruth Codd) who gets accepted to a prestigious ballet school in America. Ilonka returns to Brightcliffe and finds everyone else in the library folding paper cranes while Cheri plays her cello to provide “ambience.” Amesh’s “before I die” list includes folding 1,000 paper cranes in order to hopefully get a wish from the Gods, and his friends begrudgingly agreed to help. After she and her family move, she starts to resent the pressure she feels to be perfect and wants to experience the fun things in life. Just as Ilonka is about to collect some spring water, she meets Shasta (Samantha Sloyan), a woman who lives on the edge of the property. Stanton reassures him, and the group, that they are free to grieve whatever they may miss after they are gone. Cheri (Adia) is next, sharing that she is grieving the pets back home that she will likely never see again. The theme of this group therapy session is “What do you grieve?” Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota) shares his sadness knowing that he won’t live to see the PlayStation, as trivial as that may be. Even though don’t know her diagnosis, and we only catch a brief glimpse of Tristan when Mark (Zach Gilford) goes in to care for her, her prognosis doesn’t look great. Anya awakens from a nightmare wherein the shadow completely surrounds her to find Ilonka making tea in their room.

Midnight Club creator Mike Flanagan talks to TVLine about the 'big gamble' of Episode 7 and taking inspiration from HBO's 'Six Feet Under.'

If they know I’m wrong and know that that’s not the way to play the scene and they don’t make the adjustment, then I’m like, ‘Oh, we’re not going to get there together.’ “I really messed with her at first by giving her the wrong direction, the absolute worst approach to a scene. But Flanagan also clued TVLine in on how he “really messed with” Codd during the audition process. There’s a remarkable episode where [Peter Krause’s] Nate is in surgery and he goes under, and they kind of flash forward as though the surgery’s over. “In the book, Anya dies in the hospice and that’s kind of it. Whatever’s left.” She confesses through seething anger that the rest of the Midnight Club are all dead, and that she hates herself for being alive.

Cults are inherently fascist in nature, and their actions are nefarious. In "The Midnight Club," the Paragon Society and Julia Jayne represent it.

This means that Stanton is suffering from cancer, and she is combining the ways of the Paragon with whatever’s inside Brightcliffe to increase her lifespan. But she begins to reprimand her for bringing Julia into the hospice by considering her to be a friend and Stanton to be the enemy. That somehow motivates Ilonka to go ahead with the ritual, and she urges the rest of the clubbers to join in. The foreboding note is Stanton taking off her wig to reveal the Paragon tattoo on the back of her neck. Or, and this is based on the image of the Cataract Woman and the Mirror Man in Stanton’s room, Stanton is using/wielding/controlling a version of the “Toshi no Taberu Hito” (“eater of years” or “the years eater”) to siphon the lives of the terminally ill teens in Brightcliffe and thrive off of them. Finally, she shares the information with Shasta, who assures Ilonka that she’s correct in feeling that she is the one who has been cured and is going home. She also reveals that she is the one who messed with the intercom to make Spence think that Tristan was calling out to him. That helps her to connect the dots between 292.13 and a diary in the library that has the Paragon’s symbol on it. She goes back to her room to look through Julia’s file, and she comes across a sketch of a tree with the hourglass mark of the Paragon on it and the number 292.13 written on it, as well as all the other sketches in the file. This rift is largely fueled by Sandra because of her religious roots and since she believes that it’s the devil’s way of getting the group to do something wrong (like selling their soul). Georgina Stanton](https://dmtalkies.com/connection-athena-and-georgina-stanton-in-the-midnight-club-explained/) (Heather Langenkamp – the founder of Brightcliffe) about Julia Jayne, and she gives a very vague answer about a misdiagnosis, it indicates that Ilonka is onto something. Because it’s those stories that motivate Ilonka to go deeper down the rabbit hole of the cult called the Paragon (that used to reside in Brightcliffe) and use their methods to cure her friends.

The Midnight Club works as a quasi-anthology, with its cast of characters sharing horror stories. But who is the best storyteller of the show?

Our boy Dusty takes the crown as the king of horror stories in The Midnight Club. It’s a killer concept that’s flawlessly executed and helps to tell the audience exactly what to expect from the show: creative horror stories that serve a higher purpose, as they allow the audience to know the Midnight Club’s members better. That changes “Witch,” as the story becomes a fantasy where Ilonka gives away her life to save Anya. Since “Witch” is split into two parts, the story becomes a testament to the changes caused by Anya’s (Ruth Codd) death. Finally, “The Eternal Enemy” is the second story of the season to deal with time travel and people altering their own fate, which feels a little uninspired just before the season finale. The fact the story is presented in black and white and in a square screen format only makes “Gimme a Kiss” stand out even more from the rest of the club’s stories. While representing one of the most significant character growths of the whole season, “Gimme a Kiss” is also a perfect homage to campy noir stories, where detectives face absurd murders and incredible twists. The issue with “The Eternal Enemy” is that the story only comes in the ninth episode when we are all more interested in the resolution of the series’ central mystery. However, even though Ilonka’s changes to Julia Jayne’s story are interesting, the tale is just a retelling of something that will be hammered the whole season. Maybe it’s because we only listen to the ending of it, but Natsuki's (Aya Furukawa) tale of the schoolgirl ghost is by far the worst story in The Midnight Club. Following a quasi-anthology format, each episode of The Midnight Club invites a new Brightcliffe patient to share a horror story. That’s where the series name comes from, as the members of the Midnight Club take turns to scare their friends and share horror stories closely related to their personal experiences with death and sickness.

Sandra and Spence get in a fight about Christianity, and Sandra tells a film noir–inspired scary story. A recap of season one, episode four of Mike ...

Apparently, after Alice’s best friend and student journalist Jake (played by Spence) was exposed for having a secret relationship with Alice’s popular ex-boyfriend Kirk (played by Kevin), he swore to get revenge with the help of Sharon (played by Ilonka). Inspired by classic noir and presented to us in a nice black and white, most of the story is told by Alice Palmer (Sandra’s self-insert) to Detective Fisher (played by Dr. As Alice lies bleeding out on the floor, shot by Jake in self-defense and rescued by Sharon’s and Kirk’s angels, she apologizes. But her regret is genuine when she tells Spence that God would never treat him the way that some of His supposed followers do. But the main focal characters in “Gimme a Kiss” are Spence and Sandra, who are butting heads more than ever about Sandra’s faith. Anya, for one, is a character I care about, and the real cliffhanger of the episode comes from worrying about whether she’s fallen at the hands of the same shadow that followed Rachel in her final days. Despite my slight impatience with the acceleration of The Midnight Club’s horror, I do love a teen drama, so I’m entertained enough following these characters on their journeys — especially because the show’s sense of humor and supernatural edge keep it from feeling too similar to other teen-cancer weepies. Stanton’s purchase of Brightcliffe in the ’60s — with leftover cult supplies (robes, knife, etc.) left there for decades by the Paragon. Part of me does get a little impatient when each episode only inches the plot forward in Ilonka’s solo detective mission (with Kevin sometimes there for an assist). If you’re hoping for a horror series that really gets under your skin — or even just a bingeable thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat — you might be disappointed with this season so far. It relies primarily on the natural conflicts that develop among a group of terminally ill teens forming a tight-knit family in what’s likely the final year of their lives. If you’ve seen Mike Flanagan’s previous series, particularly Midnight Mass, you may be familiar with this balance of drama and horror — with more screen time generally spent on the former.