I generally try to stay away from series during the Halloween and Christmas review season. Not because I dislike them or I think they are going to be bad but simply because I don’t usually have the time to dedicate to an entire series when I’m trying to post a new review each day. Thankfully, I was able to fit The Midnight Club into my schedule this year.
Ilonka (Iman Benson) is a teenager with terminal thyroid cancer. She decides to move into Brightcliffe, a hospice for dying teenagers. Every night, the group of eight teenagers get together at midnight to tell scary stories. Is there more to the tales they tell and is Brightcliffe just a hospice center?
Last year, Mike Flanagan gave us the brilliant Midnight Mass. While The Midnight Club is based on a handful of young adult novels by Christopher Pike, I had high hopes that this would be a good series. While there are some slow parts, I was not let down.
To be honest, I don’t want to give too much of the story away. I think that this is a show that should be experienced without a lot of knowledge ahead of time. There are a few things that are up to interpretation but some other things are explained eventually. But I think my favorite thing about the series is that each story told by a teenager is based in other Christopher Pike books. They aren’t exact replicas of the books, that tends to make for terrible television anyway, but they are versions that fit the members of The Midnight Club. It is definitely an imaginative way to make the most out of all of the source material available.
In short, yes, I think you should watch it. The Midnight Club is set up to be a multi-season show. I hope that Netflix doesn’t let us down and renews the series. We could definitely use a good spooky series like this every Halloween season. And since the show is set up to have the characters die and get replaced with new ones, having the actors age out of their characters shouldn’t be a big deal. I really would love to see more of this.