The Midnight Club

Director Mike Flanagan was recognized for the tremendous number of jump scares in his new show The Midnight Club. But he isn't a huge fan of them to begin ...

And The Midnight Club was one that really kind of hit me in the heart and dealt with death and mortality in a way that I was not expecting to be confronted with at that age. One of the greatest of all time jump scares is in Jaws and I love it. Typically in horror, the backbone of the whole thing is: Are these people going to live? This is my kind of nostalgic attempt to dig into what got me into horror in the first place. And the Guinness thing is really funny to me because because I am not the filmmaker who likes jump scares. And then if you kind of stuck with the genre, you were after Stephen King after that.

While this is not unusual for many shows, it is unusual for a Mike Flanagan series, and something I wasn't expecting to see here. The Haunting of Hill House, ...

- We don’t know for sure if the members of the Midnight Club can stick around as ghosts and communicate in anything other than maybe extremely tiny ways. But we do not have an official declaration that season 2 is coming yet, and it’s too early to know just how Midnight Club is performing. You can chalk up the two healings so far to potential misdiagnoses or natural good luck, and it seems Shasta is probably sick again anyway. Now that the show is out, we know what they are. So he designed the show to need a second season, and banked on his goodwill with Netflix to make that happen. The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass were all self-contained, one season stories, and I was expecting the same from The Midnight Club.

While not all the stories are that scary, they all have their merits and do an excellent job of getting audiences into the heads of the characters telling them.

Ilonka's story in the first season of The Midnight Club revolves around her being unwilling to accept her mortality. The highlight comes when Ilonka is unable to describe the death of her main character, similar to how she struggles to admit she is dying. Though Natsuki's first story was played for laughs, the second story she tells is one of the most emotional in the show. The story is about a hard-working ballerina, Dana, who wishes she didn't have to be perfect all the time. It is an appropriately uplifting end to the first season. The story is eery and full of mysteries that can't be answered at the time of its telling. The story is simple and doesn't cut away to a re-creation the way other stories do, but it is still impactful. While the story has an interesting theme, the story itself has some flaws. [If the Terminator poster](https://www.cbr.com/movie-franchises-that-got-progressively-worse/) at the beginning of "The Eternal Enemy" doesn't make it clear what Spence's story is based on, the cyborg with glowing red eyes will erase any doubt. It is an exciting concept but gets bogged down with a romance sub-plot that involves the unceremonious fridging of Luke's love interest. The story is humorous as the absurd number of jump scares desensitizes the audience to the point that they laugh at this overused horror trope. While not an official story told at a Midnight Club meeting, Anya's story about her former roommate sets the stage for the show's premise.

Oh, and the two lovesick fools finally kiss! But in the last moments of the episode, Dr. Georgina Stanton (“A Nightmare on Elm Street's” Heather Langenkamp) — ...

But yeah, the show was designed to carry forward and we made the decision in the writers room not to reveal two of our kind of bigger existential secrets of the show so that we’d have something to say in the second season.” “This was the first [series] I’ve worked on that was designed to be ongoing,” the “Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass” showrunner said in a separate interview. What to make of this, and what does the cast want to see in Season 2?

The Midnight Club star Igby Rigney age, height, Instagram, and more: Everything you need to know about the Kevin actor from Mike Flannagan's new horror ...

Most recently, you may have caught the actor in Mike Flannagan’s other Netflix horror hit, Midnight Mass as Warren Flynn. The Midnight Club star, Igby Rigney is 19 years old. The actor uses his social media platform to share posts from the project he’s working on, as well as outtakes from his day-to-day life. If you were to give the actor a follow, you’ll find plenty of content to devour. Igby Rigney is one of the members of the spooky club taking center stage as Kevin, “a boy-next-door type with a charming smile,” as per the official Netflix description. The actor’s star sign is Gemini.

Co-creator Mike Flanagan tells TheWrap what fans can expect to be revealed in a potential Season 2.

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"Midnight Club" creator Mike Flanagan breaks down the major mysteries in Season 1 and promises Season 2 answers -- even if it doesn't get renewed.

There are a couple little clever turns of phrase and a couple little nods to “Fall of the House of Usher,” we hit a little Poe. I’ve seen some stuff online where people have put some value on the 5th episode with our stuff as being kind of where we break format and try to pull the rug out a little bit and for this I was like, “No, no it’s Episode 7.” That one is one of my favorites. They pitched it very passionately in the writers’ room, about how to kind of live in Anya’s experience. We had an opportunity to have an episode where the B-story wasn’t so much something being told around a campfire, but something someone was experiencing and that, in the way all of the stories the kids tell impact each other, we thought there was a chance to pull those threads together and just kind of see how these things existed in Anya’s mind at a very specific moment. They kind of flash it forward as though the surgery is over and then that reality starts to break down and it becomes incredible… In the book, Anya dies in the hospice and that’s kind of it. We can’t let this old guy drive this into the wall.’ But my oldest son, Rigby, I would check in with him and bounce ideas and see what he thought, and if I thought something was going to be too uncomfortable for him to watch, it felt like we were tipping.” “I think he treats his protagonists with more respect than a lot of YA authors do today. And that was something that separated Pike from his contemporaries.” “And Netflix ended up optioning a pile of Christopher Pike’s stuff — 28 books.” “But the other thing, though — and this is something I learned from Pike — was that he always included themes in his books that felt very adult,” Flanagan continued. 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.

The Midnight Club co-creator Mike Flanagan answers burning questions about the Netflix series' finale ending and teases what will be revealed in Season 2.

“But yeah, the show was designed to carry forward and we made the decision in the writers room not to reveal two of our kind of bigger existential secrets of the show, so that we’d have something to say in the second season. But we know kind of who is still alive of the original cast by the end of the season and we know where we were going to reveal kind of two huge truths about the central mysteries of the show, about the elderly couple and about Stanton. I don’t know if that will happen, we’ll have to wait and see, but if it doesn’t, I promised everybody at Comic Con yesterday that I’ll put up all the all the answers to the central mysteries on Twitter, which I will honor,” the “Bly Manor” creator said. We were gonna get into some of his very well-known titles and try to draw them out beyond just a 25-minute B story in one episode, we were going to kind of have a secondary longer story running through the season. “This is the first one I’ve worked on that was designed to be ongoing. As for the wig, that’s a much bigger deal and whether that is indicating that there’s something sinister going on with her or something else, that we do have in store for very early in the second season to reveal.” As for the elderly couple, if you’ve read Pike’s book you know “The Midnight Club” has a lot to say about past lives. There’s one major clue, I think it shouldn’t be too tough – looking back at the season – to kind of figure out why the tattoo is there and who she may be in actuality. So who are the old couple, who is Dr. Stanton’s apartment where a newspaper clipping shown on the wall reveals the original builders/owners of Brightcliffe – and they’re the elderly couple that Ilonka and Kevin have been seeing throughout the season. Stanton (Heather Langenkamp), who explained to Ilonka that Julia previously had a recovery like Sandra’s and is sick again, thinking the Paragon ritual will “heal” her. [“The Midnight Club,”](https://www.thewrap.com/tag/the-midnight-club/) there are a couple of huge plot threads left dangling.

Review: Mike Flanagan's latest show is a gripping tale about terminally ill teenagers facing death in more ways than one.

Like '80s-set The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Midnight Club is a period piece. The Midnight Club itself is the name of a meeting between terminally ill teenage patients at Brightcliffe Hospice. Inevitably some of the ghost stories are more exciting, moving and distressing than others, but they all fit surprisingly smoothly into the framework of episodic mini-movies. With characters so close to the brink of death, any escape, no matter how fantastical, is worth exploring. A serial killer, a cult and reflections on mortality elevate The Midnight Club to a more sophisticated realm. Yet it has all the hallmarks of a young adult fantasy.

Mike Flanagan adapting Christopher Pike is a dream come true for a lot of horror fans who grew up in the 90s and 00s. Pike's story provides the foundation for ...

In the meantime, it looks like we have all the answers we’re going to get until Season 2 of The Midnight Club. And that was something I thought thematically was very important to keep in the show.” What we do see after the two kids finish their stories and share their long-awaited first kiss is a scene featuring Doctor Stanton (Heather Langenkamp) with the reveal that she is not only a survivor herself, but a former member of the Paragon. In the finale of The Midnight Club, we see Ilonka (Iman Benson) and Kevin (Igby Rigney) finish off their respective tales. Thankfully, IGN’s own Tom Jorgensen sat down with the horror maestro himself to help make sense of what we saw at the end of The Midnight Club and to reveal a couple tidbits about what he hopes to share in Season 2. Mike Flanagan adapting Christopher Pike is a dream come true for a lot of horror fans who grew up in the 90s and 00s.

Creator Mike Flanagan spills details on his future 'Midnight Club' plans and reveals some tasty Easter eggs hidden inside the episodes.

* “The book is sad in that the club dies, but the epilogue of the book is beautiful. * “There are some cameos in the show that are fun and really hard to find. If you haven’t read The Midnight Club, the epilogue of the book is very important to us. “The thing we have that the book didn’t is that as we lose our cast members, we’ll have new ones and eventually, Ilonka orients the kids in,” he said. And it’s as if it was never broken in the first place. We didn’t answer some of the bigger questions of the season.

Mike Flanagan adapting Christopher Pike is a dream come true for a lot of horror fans who grew up in the 90s and 00s. Pike's story provides the foundation for ...

In the meantime, it looks like we have all the answers we’re going to get until Season 2 of The Midnight Club. And that was something I thought thematically was very important to keep in the show.” “Her connection to that [the Paragon] is deeply personal and it wouldn't be too difficult, I think, looking back at the season.” What we do see after the two kids finish their stories and share their long-awaited first kiss is a scene featuring Doctor Stanton (Heather Langenkamp) with the reveal that she is not only a survivor herself, but a former member of the Paragon. Thankfully, IGN’s own Tom Jorgensen sat down with the horror maestro himself to help make sense of what we saw at the end of The Midnight Club and to reveal a couple tidbits about what he hopes to share in Season 2. In the finale of The Midnight Club, we see Ilonka (Iman Benson) and Kevin (Igby Rigney) finish off their respective tales.

What's Dr. Stanton's true identity? Will there be a season 2? Let's discuss everything to know about Mike Flanagan's latest horror show.

In 1993, a young cancer patient asked him to write a story about her and the kids in her ward, who had started a "Midnight Club." While a portion of the house's facade was set up on the filming site in Pitt Meadows, Vancouver, the majority of the exterior was created through VFX magic. (This contradicts Ilonka's research -- she says the house was built in 1901.) Maybe this musical connection is supposed to suggest that Stanton is far older than she appears and that her longevity has something to do with this "marvel" of a house. Natsuki then shares that her mother told her a story about a "thing," an "eater of years" or "the years eater" which looked like an old woman. The story of The Midnight Club is based on Christopher Pike's young adult novel of the same name. The old newspaper clipping says that the New Freelan Estate was finished in mid-1898 and that it's "truly a marvel of architecture." Maybe Stanton managed to keep Julian alive thanks to the Paragon's methods, but it came at a price: Julian now exists as a sort of in-between being. To keep him alive, Stanton has been using the house and its special properties -- that's why she goes to great lengths to keep Julia and the new Paragon cult out of the picture. Like Ilonka, Julia was also diagnosed with thyroid cancer in the throat as a teenager. The origins of the Paragon cult are all recorded in a diary that was kept by the cult leader's disillusioned 16-year-old daughter, Athena. After the Paragon tragedy, Ballard was sent to a mental institution. Aside from Easter egg references to [Flanagan's previous works](/culture/entertainment/netflix-midnight-mass-ending-explained-mike-flanagan-the-haunting-easter-eggs/), the first season of the [Netflix](/culture/entertainment/netflix-the-50-absolute-best-tv-series-to-watch-this-week/) series uncoils an unpredictable mystery with a satisfying ending.

The Midnight Club ended with a shocking twist, revealing the greatest secret of Dr. Stanton - and hinting at much more sinister secrets to come.

The Midnight Club strongly implies that the Freelans are in fact the Eaters of Years, legendary beings who consume the lost years of dying children. In The Midnight Club episode 4, Ilonka discovered a journal left behind by a teenager called Athena, daughter of Regina Ballard, founder of the Paragon cult. The tattoo is in the same place as one seen on Athena, daughter of the woman who had founded the Paragons. The camera panned around her head to reveal a tattoo on the back of her neck, the emblem of the Paragon cult that had operated in Brightcliffe Manor years ago. The overturned hourglass on the back of her neck revealed she had once been part of the Paragons, however, and it is even possible she still believes some of their lore. [The Midnight Club](https://screenrant.com/tag/the-midnight-club/) season 1 ended with a dramatic reveal, as viewers learned the secret of Dr.

Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong's The Midnight Club leaves many unsolved questions behind, teasing a possible second season.

One of the most obvious authors of the sign is Dr. Ilonka chooses to believe Anya reached out from the beyond and fixed the statue as a sign for the club. And if she has some Paragon history, she might be trying to stop the young patients of Brightcliffe from committing a human sacrifice. However, at the finale it becomes clear that Ilonka and Kevin are the only targets of the ghosts. However, if Shasta still believes that human sacrifice is the key to a long and prosperous life, does that mean Julia murdered the first Midnight Club to be free of her cancer? One of the final episodes of The Midnight Club even teases that the ghost of the woman might be possessing Kevin and forcing him to wander Brightcliffe at night. Georgia and Ilonka try to resuscitate the three women who were poisoned by Shasta during the pagan ritual. While Ilonka (Iman Benson) spends most of The Midnight Club’s runtime exploring the secrets of the Paragon and trying to recreate pagan rituals, the girl comes to terms with her own death in the finale. At the end of The Midnight Club’s first season, we find out that Shasta is actually Julia Jayne, the teenager who founded the Midnight Club and theoretically used ancient pagan rituals to cure her cancer. Georgia was aware of the Midnight Club gatherings, knew about the hidden basement where the Paragon performed pagan rituals, and even got to the basement through secret stairs. The last scene of The Midnight Club reveals that Dr. The finale of The Midnight Club had a shocking reveal about Dr.

The irony being that Flanagan has been vocal about his hatred of the jump scare technique. “My whole career I completely shit on jump scares as a concept, and I ...

The slow ramping up of tension gets the audiences asking themselves in which corner of the screen the threat is going to appear from. This scene has been widely credited as being the first real jump scare, to the extent the technique was referred to as the Lewton Bus (a reference to producer Val Lewton’s involvement in crafting this scare). There’s arguably no horror scene as iconic as the famous moment when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) dies in the shower to the sound of screaming violins in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. As a detective roams around the Bates house, tension beautifully builds with the use of Bernard Herrman’s score. And he’s been sent to hell and back. [Deadline](https://deadline.com/2022/10/the-midnight-club-now-guiness-world-records-holder-1235137919/) in a statement: “I thought, ‘We’re going to do all of them at once, and then if we do it right, a jump scare will be rendered meaningless for the rest of the series.’ It’ll just destroy it. The most memorable scare in Steven Spielberg's shark movie Jaws is when Ben Gardner's bloated corpse pops out from the hole in his sunken boat. The snag is that Oliver’s wife, Irena (Simone Simon) knows and also claims she transforms into a panther whenever in the throes of passion or jealousy. They also agree to a pact that whoever dies first will try to come back to tell the others if there is an afterlife. The reason it works so well is that the slow build up of tension and the non-threat resolution wrongfoots the audience. Like all maligned tropes, there are some redeeming ones that show there is an art to perfecting a calibrated jump scare. Flanagan also directed the adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining, titled Doctor Sleep.

This was fun! We get to know most of the characters a little better and the Brightcliffe storyline moved along zippily. A solid cliffhanger, too. Warning: ...

The music in the show seems to be going for a period-appropriate '90s indie pop vibe. That said, if he turns out to be the secret villain it will be a hilarious cliche. She's trapped alone in a room marked with the hourglass symbol on the floor - and a sinister ghostly figure lurking in the shadows. In the episode's last act, Ilonka and Kevin discover a hidden button in the elevator, marked with the hourglass symbol. We got to know most of the characters a little better and the Brightcliffe storyline moved along zippily. Perhaps it was the tighter length of 'The Wicked Heart' and the way that it kept intercutting between the story and the real events back at Brightcliffe, but this worked far better for me than the Club scenes in previous episodes. The series so far is turning out to be an enjoyably pulpy teen drama and while it's not especially scary, the various plot threads are starting to tie together. All of these characters have been dealt an absolutely appalling hand in life and it's remarkable that he's able to keep it together as well as he seems to have so far. Cheri is hiding in her room with only the nurse, Mark, for company. Natsuki's mother is there, at least, but on slightly melancholy business - her daughter is looking for the very last photo taken of her soldier father before he was killed in an ambush. Natsuki goes to visit sickly Tristan in her room but finds that she has passed away in her bed. You'd think this would be a happy occasion, but nothing is easy in a place like this.

The Midnight Club, Netflix's latest offering from Mike Flanagan, has set a Guinness World Record for following a classic horror trope.

[Deadline](https://deadline.com/2022/10/the-midnight-club-now-guiness-world-records-holder-1235137919/), prior to the launch of the series, co-creator Flanagan and the creative team were presented with the [record for the most jump scares](http://gamerant.com/horror-movie-jump-scares-good-psycho-scream-halloween-insidious-watcher/) in a single episode at Netflix's New York Headquarters. 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.'” As the current world record holder, it’s hard to argue with the man. While some may have seen the show already, most viewers have probably yet to sit down and watch the series. According to the report, Flanagan is not a fan of jump scares and instead decided to include so many to get them out of the way. Flanagan says, “I thought, ‘We’re going to do all of them at once, and then if we do it right, a jump scare will be rendered meaningless for the rest of the series.’ It’ll just destroy it. The eight teenagers meet every midnight to tell scary stories to one another and begin to discover that Brightcliffe might not be what it appears.

In The Midnight Club episode 2, Anya tells the story of a girl, Dana, who lives a double life - here's what the dark story reveals about Anya's past.

[Netflix's The Midnight Club](https://screenrant.com/midnight-club-connection-bly-manor-hill-house-flanagan/) episode 5, "See You Later," she finally opens up and reveals that just like Dana, she wanted to be a ballerina and moved to the US after being accepted in a prestigious ballet academy. Even from a storytelling standpoint, since Dana 1 was the protagonist in Anya's The Midnight Club story, it would make more sense for Dana 2 to die after leaving Dana 1's life scarred by her actions. As Dana 2 goes out and parties while Dana 1 experiences it all in the comfort of her protective home, it is initially all sunshine and rainbows for both. This back-and-forth between the two leads to a one-on-one showdown that serves as a final nail in the coffin of Dana's perfect life. Hence, in a pursuit to get the best of both worlds, she makes a deal with the devil and gets rewarded with a cloned version of herself, Dana 2. [The Midnight Club](https://screenrant.com/tag/the-midnight-club/) episode 2 story, a girl named Dana clones herself to live a double life, but only one Dana ultimately survives the chaos that follows.

'The Midnight Club' totally nails the early '90s aesthetic, but one song stuck out as a bit of an anachronism, and Mike Flanagan explained the choice.

Flanagan went on to explain that nailing the emotional core of the scene was more important to him than historical accuracy. But none of that accounts for how seven kids in 1994 would possibly be familiar with the song at that point. At the end of the series’ most emotional episode, the remaining seven members of the Midnight Club memorialize their fallen friend Anya by scattering her ashes at the beach as Cheri begins playing Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” on her cello.

It's difficult not to view these long digressions as distractions this close to the end of the season. A recap of season one, episode nine of Mike ...

Ilonka harshly tells her that her desire for him to appear normal is weighing on him, and that he shouldn’t have to put on a brave face for her. That journey damaged his memory, but his background code makes it so that he recognizes the importance of Christopher — he just forgets that his mission is to kill him and prevent the A.I. But I have to say this one didn’t do much for me overall, especially compared to Natsuki’s story in the last episode. Stanton makes it there to intervene, but Ilonka has never listened to her over Julia, for the simple reason that Julia is the one telling her what she wants to hear. And good thing he does, because one tape reveals that Christopher is going to be gassed and dismembered by an intruder that night. It’d be nice to see Ilonka in this mode more often. To make things worse, she admits it was her talking to Spence on the intercom, not some ghost; he was in a dark spot and she wanted to give him some hope. Though Ilonka has plenty of reason to be skeptical — and it seems more obvious than ever to the audience that this isn’t going to end well — she still has blinders on, hyper-fixated on the slim possibility of her survival. (It’s like when I got scammed out of a Charly Bliss concert ticket by a Facebook vendor I wanted to believe was legit, despite all evidence to the contrary.) She clearly has qualms about letting in three uninvited guests, and the mention of the Five Sisters should further deter her, not reassure her. Spence’s story is about a transfer student named Rel and his romance with Christopher Perry, a robotics student. After she was cured, she started the collective to share her miracle and heal people. The bigger drama of the episode comes from Ilonka’s continual desperation to survive following the realization that she wasn’t the cured patient.

Midnight” is 'The Midnight Club' in a nutshell, with all the strengths and weaknesses the season ever had. A recap of the season one finale of Mike ...

Enough is neatly tidied up here that it’s frustrating to notice the bits that aren’t, even allowing for the possibility of a second season that ties up the remaining loose ends. My feelings about Ilonka have been complicated over the course of this season; with so much of her storyline focused on survival and investigation, there was little room to watch her hang out and get to know everyone. Ben dies, like the universe always meant him to, and Imani is forced to accept what she can’t change, just like Ilonka. The kiss between the two was always going to happen, but it’s still a little forced. But to me, there’s little it accomplishes that isn’t later spelled out in the penultimate scene, when Kevin tells Ilonka that he’s always afraid of hurting the people he cares about and she says that’s no reason to be alone. Many of the episodic “horror” tales in this season were fun, creative, and insightful, but they took up more time the longer the season went on instead of less. I figured the finale would feature a final session of the Midnight Club, but I’m not sure I was expecting such a large portion of the time to be fictional stories. Didn’t Ilonka have visions of the Mirror Man before she came to Brightcliffe, before she was even on meds? And if it really was just a coincidence that Julia recovered right after her return to Brightcliffe, that’s a bit cheap. Stanton and Ilonka let Julia go so they can resuscitate the three women she was willing to sacrifice, and the two have a longer conversation the following day. “Midnight” is The Midnight Club in a nutshell, with all the strengths and weaknesses it ever had. Aceso, a pariah who no longer spoke to the daughter who sabotaged her demented human sacrifice, agreed to help Julia heal on the condition that she wouldn’t speak about Aceso when she returned to Brightcliffe.