The Midnight Club

Mike was seriously becoming my favorite director during Haunting at Hill House. I loved Dr. Sleep and how it finally told the ending to the Shining story. It made me go back and watch every single piece of work he directed and I loved most of them but not all.

Unfortunately, I am not sure if its the producers, Netflix, or some other "entity" out there, but I feel like he is losing his touch or "rinse and repeat". The scare tactics are the same. I don't mind the reusing of actors from time to time as I get it...he has some favorites. The slow melancholy piano music is getting to be the same over and over. I am starting to feel another M. Night Shyamalan coming on with a few great works but it goes down hill from there.

Please, Mike, for the sake of your fans...evolve. You have a gift of story telling that could make you one of the best out there....but your fans need more than "rinse and repeats". Transform the thriller industry. Take a step up and not back, and give us something that we want to watch over and over, tell our friends about, and always come back as one of the classics.

This Midnight Club had some good story telling, some good scares, some good plots, some good emotions, some good acting, some good directing....but you are better than mediocrity. Mike, become what we all think you are capable of.

If you aren't familiar with Christopher Pike books, this won't be a hit for you. It's unfortunate that they tried to make it a teen horror, as Pike's books aren't scary. I'm not upset with the changes to The Midnight Club book, as there is no way they could have made a series from that. Again nothing scary. It was a book about dying teens who told each other stories at midnight. There was no over arching mystery involved. So the parts about the symbol and the patient who was cured are all new for this series.

What I do like about this is that there have been no good film adaptations of Pike's books. At least here were get snippets in the short stories the characters tell.

If you are looking for something more along the lines of Hill House or Midnight Mass, this isn't it. This is more like a more mature version of Are You Afraid of the Dark. For me, that's not a bad thing.

The Midnight Club is not really horror. It has horror elements but it's mostly teen drama. If you're expecting a series along the lines of Mike Flanagan's previous Netflix horror series', you may be disappointed. But if you go into it knowing that it's based on young-adult rather than classic literature, perhaps you can appreciate it for what it is. The Midnight Club is based on material by highly successful YA author Christopher Pike, not on classic ghost stories by writers like Shirley Jackson or Henry James.

Since I knew going in what the source material is, I was expecting a teen drama with some horror elements, and that's exactly what this is. It started pretty strong, lots of mystery, and the characters drew me in. Most of the cast are very good, and the series is beautifully shot. There's no mistaking that this is 100% Mike Flanagan. And like everything Flanagan does, it's heavy with emotion (at times too heavy).

Unfortunately, it does get slow about halfway through the season, it's a bit hard to follow at times, and it just doesn't have the same magic that Hill House, Bly or Midnight Mass do. I still found it moving and entertaining, but I didn't love it. There are too many unanswered questions and disconnected ideas. Rather than moving slowly and leaving all those unanswered questions for a probable season 2, I would have preferred Flanagan had stuck to his formula of one-season stories that move quickly and wrap up nicely in the end.

I have great respect for Mike Flanagan and his vision and ability to tell a story with both horror and heart. Though by no means terrible, The Midnight Club is not his best. I still have high hopes for The Fall of the House of Usher. Flanagan has proven what he can do with classic horror. I can't wait to see what he does with the works of Poe.

**Unlike some others, this review was written after watching the whole season.

People go into hospice as a last resort, usually when nothing more can be done medically snd/or when they cannit care for themselves, meds are stopped and people die in comfort. This show has a bunch of kids in a hospice but they all look healthy, act healthy, can move around freely and can care for themselves, and they claim to be on meds but we never see any plus a real hospice stops treatments and uses pain releivers, why are they really there, it makes no sense. This is more like a dorm and kids are up at all hours, sneaking around, snooping, and seem to have no ditection. None are exhibiting sickness or weaknrss...in real life they would not be in hospice.

I watched all ten episodes of The Midnight Club. What kept me watching? The creative writing. Decent acting. Fantastic atmosphere. Finally, I loved the choice of music.

What I had issues with, I was a Hospice nurse for all ages, and none of my residence looked so...healthy. They were not up all hours of the night, roaming around and climbing stairs. By the time anyone enters Hospice care - it is palliative care. Even my youngest of patients never exhibited the level of energy like the movie. It made it difficult to see them as dying.

The stories within the story were well-written, but took away from the shows main objective. As for the main objective, it can be interpreted in several ways, but I'm unsure what the creators were tying to convey.

I think too many things suffered a high level of ambiguity, and left me feeling like it needed a finish line.