Projects like “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” “Midnight Mass,” “Doctor Sleep,” and “Gerald’s Game” have generated enormous fan bases and established Mike Flanagan as a modern horror master. Mike Flanagan is recognized for his heady, very emotional forays into horror. His most recent endeavor places him in “The Midnight Club,” based on the Christopher Pike novel of the same name, taking him out of his customary world of grownups dealing with the most. A group of teens with terminal illnesses who reside at the Brightcliffe Hospice facility overseen by the enigmatic Dr. Georgina Stanton gather every night at midnight to exchange ghost stories that horrifyingly come to life.
There is disagreement among critics and viewers regarding “The Midnight Club,” but with over 80 Christopher Pike books to adapt, there is no reason for “The Midnight Club” to finish after its first season. In a Collider interview, Flanagan discussed a potential second season and how “The Midnight Club” is different from his other Netflix productions. “Because you want the season to end and be fulfilling, but you also need to leave enough on the field that people would want to return, this is the first time we’ve ever planned something to be continuous, and it’s bizarre, it’s a whole different atmosphere. Usually, when we finish a performance, we can discuss it and go on, but with this one, we don’t know if we’ll be doing more or if it will come back.” The waiting game was “suspenseful,” according to Flanagan, who praised it as a chance to “feel the tension for a change.”
Characters on terminals can be problematic
The first season of “The Midnight Club” intentionally ended on a cliffhanger. Still, it presents a unique issue in terms of how to continue a show when the main characters are always in danger of passing away. According to Flanagan, we could have seen favorite some of our favorite characters if season 2 has a time leap. Although Netflix hasn’t officially given the second season the light, Flanagan told Collider that they wouldn’t move very far ahead in time if it did. Many of our characters, he said, “don’t have a lot of time to burn.” We would thus be picking up where we left off quite quickly.
No matter how much we adore the characters, it seems strange that the show’s internal timeline includes their deaths. The catch with this program, according to Flanagan, is that a new cast will be needed if it does continue. And when others move in, they’ll have to sort of enter one at a time. Even though the idea of dying is extremely depressing, it is an awful aspect of existence. It’s difficult to say goodbye to a character we’re only getting to know when they’re given a fatal diagnosis when they’re still quite young. “Hopefully, we were able to have some good emotional arcs that fulfill themselves, but also, you know, mythical things,” said Leah Fong, co-creator of the program.