The first trailer has dropped for Netflix’s The Midnight Club, bringing with it teen memories of staying up late reading Christopher Pike novels via flashlight. The series is produced and created by Mike Flanagan, who brought us the excellent horror series The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. The Midnight Club, adapted from Pike’s 1994 novel, follows 8 terminally ill young adults living in hospice care, who gather every night at midnight to tell scary stories. The group make a pact that the first one to die will send them a sign from the beyond, and when it happens, strange occurrences begin to haunt the survivors.
The series stars Iman Benson (BlackAF), Adia, Igby Rigney (Midnight Mass), Ruth Codd, Aya Furukawa (The Baby-Sitters Club), Annarah Cymone (Midnight Mass), William Chris Sumpter (Power), and Sauriyan Sapkota as the club members. Joining them will be fellow Midnight Mass alums Zach Gilford, Samantha Sloyan, Matt Biedel, and Rahul Kohli. I’m most excited for horror legend Heather Langenkamp (Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street series) as the hospice’s mysterious Dr. Stanton.
The trailer contains everything we’ve come to expect from a Flanagan series: moody old buildings, suppressed trauma, religious allegory, and found family. We also get a spookily slowed-down nostalgic needle drop of “Possum Kingdom” courtesy of The Toadies. The series appears to retain the novel’s mid-nineties setting, with plenty of teen angst, romantic drama, and most importantly, scares.
The Midnight Club is one of the more poignant entries in Pike’s catalogue. The author of beloved horror series like Chain Letter, Final Friends, and Remember Me, Pike was a school library mainstay, spooking generations of pre-teens and teens. I always though of Pike as the next step up from R.L. Stine’s works, given the hornier and more adult themes of his books. Even the cover art is sure to spark a wave of nostalgia for millennials. And it looks like The Midnight Club will be the latest entry into Flanagan’s stable of moody, cerebral horror series.
The Midnight Club premieres on October 7 on Netflix.
(featured image: Eike Schroter/Netflix)
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