A big part of anyone’s adolescence is facing the things that scare you the most, whether it leads to overcoming those fears or discovering your own limits. This can be true for the transition into adulthood and all the obstacles that come with it, or even true for the stories we are just invested in. For teens growing up in the ’80s and ’90s in particular, one of the foundational voices in this horror is Christopher Pike, who has provided dozens of terrifying tales for the breeding of horror fans. The new series midnight club Netflix might elevate its name from a specific Pike story, although the whole is a homage to the writer’s impressive catalog. Serving to some extent as an anthology, to some extent as a comprehensive narrative, midnight club It manages to tell competent horror stories with as much variety as the numbers found in the Midnight Club itself, although it never exceeds the effectiveness of the source material.
Set in a home for terminally ill teens in 1994, residents meet regularly in the middle of the night to tell each other scary stories. While many of these stories are fantasy journeys, teens begin to see frightening signs that the death their home witnessed may make it home to more than they bargained for.
When it comes to borrowing elements from multiple novels and weaving them together into one adventure, there are few more reliable hands in the horror world than Flanagan. Netflix series Chase Hill House And the Haunting Bly Manor Both borrowed elements from Shirley Jackson and Henry James respectively, and injected new concepts to create critically acclaimed experiences. General structure and shape midnight club It makes it possible to remix items that his previous series couldn’t stand, yet this formula makes investing in it more difficult.
Both storytelling elements in this series work perfectly. The unending thread of a mysterious and possibly murderous secret contained within a house intended to help young people take death into their own hands makes for a thriller that delves into the supernatural. Distractions also succeed in introducing the stories told by the teens, because this disconnect from reality makes it possible for the series to explore a much wider range of horrors. From episode to episode, we can jump from ghost stories to sci-fi to 1950s throwback, all of which contain the right mix of whimsy and fear. The shortcomings of the series are, unfortunately, intrinsic to the approach to adapting the source material.
The overall narrative spans across 10 one-hour episodes, with some installments leaning more towards the 1994 story while others spend more time filming the tales being told. The challenge is to first have viewers invest in these fictional characters, and then we’ll be asked to invest in the outcomes of the stories these characters tell. If the series were a traditional anthology, we’d be entering a whole new reality with each episode, but by telling stories within a story, there’s a lot of disconnecting from audiences to invest a lot in these campfire tales. This undermines the effectiveness of each of these experiences, and by having episodes for such a long time, it can become a stressful experience.
Another stylistic choice that helps and hurts the series is that the actors who make up the real-world narrative also play roles in these Midnight Club stories. This helps to enrich the audience for both the performers and the characters they play in the overall narrative, and evokes a more intimate immersion in their world. On the flip side, by the time we get to the season finale, this blurring of series facts brings up baffling elements, as audiences aren’t always sure if they’re seeing reality, a story within a story, or possible. Reveal that what we thought was true was, in fact, just another story.
Narrative struggles aside, midnight club It’s still certain. Flanagan has a knack for blurring the lines between genres, telling stories that are just as effective as horror, dramas, or romance, which is what he’s following up on with this series. Part of the reason young horror fans are so interested in the genre is that this is when we begin to engage with our yard, even if in a pretty vague way. The show fully embraces all the fears that come with becoming an adult, whether that’s the global struggle for our ultimate demise or the more specific challenge of dealing with one’s sexuality and all the judgments that come with it. All the characters on the set cheat expectations and come from masked artists, making for a teen-oriented series that I felt could only have come from the pages of Pike. With each character living in lost time, seeing them revel in each other with scary stories makes us think about them, making their potential pass even more melancholy. Just like our friendships at any age, we all live in lost time midnight club A reminder not to squander these relationships while they exist, while also not letting us mark that time with their expiration dates.
Flanagan’s skills as a storyteller peaked last year Midnight Massthanks in large part to how he successfully builds dramatic and terrifying narrative momentum so organically and at an equal rate, just for midnight club to distinguish regression. Each ingredient may work on its own, but they fail to hold together into a cohesive end product. By offering a more realistic teen story (there is cursing and sexting, though not fully embracing the R-rated tone and feeling more like a PG-15), midnight club It could be the go-to drug for the burgeoning horror fanatic to invest more in the genre or specifically pike, while older audiences are likely to be less attached to disjointed horrors and more to the nature of our ultimate demise. We can run away from it and we can be afraid of it, but that won’t stop it from coming, inspiring us to value and appreciate what we have while it’s there.
Rating: 3 out of 5
midnight club Now available to stream on Netflix.
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