Once there, the hospice’s residents all strive to carry on the decades-long Brightcliffe tradition of meeting in the house’s library every night in order to tell each other scary stories. The series, which drops in its entirety on October 7, follows a group of terminally ill teenagers and young adults who check themselves into an oceanside hospice known as Brightcliffe. The Midnight Club is, in many ways, tonally lighter than any of the other Netflix shows that Flanagan has produced over the past few years, though, its premise certainly doesn’t suggest that. But The Midnight Club is also a more structurally ambitious project than any of Flanagan’s previous Netflix shows, and it doesn’t always manage to ride the difficult tonal line that is at the center of its first season. On the contrary, the YA series looks just as good as, say, The Haunting of Hill House or The Haunting of Bly Manor, and it boasts the same ability to make you jump out of your seat basically whenever it wants. That’s not to say that The Midnight Club isn’t just as entertaining or well-filmed as all of Flanagan’s past Netflix offerings.

The series, which is based on the horror novel of the same name by author Christopher Pike, chooses more often than not to face everything that happens in it with as straight a face as possible - even in the moments when a knowing smirk is deeply needed. In The Midnight Club, however, that earnestness has never felt more earned and never been quite as distracting. Up to this point, Flanagan’s commitment to taking the horror genre as seriously as he can has both paid off in spades and made his attachment to authors like Stephen King unavoidably clear.

Reviews calibre netflix