Netflix just released the first teaser for horror icon Mike Flanagan’s The Midnight Club, leading viewers to wonder whether this release will be connected to the auteur’s earlier efforts in the genre such as The Haunting of Hill House. As a writer and director, Flanagan has spent the last few years making a name for himself as Netflix’s leading creator of horror television. With hits like The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass to his name, Flanagan’s genre television pedigree is undeniably impressive.
As a result of this string of recent successes, the news that Flanagan would adapt author Christopher Pike’s YA horror novel The Midnight Club for the streaming service caused great excitement among genre aficionados. Published in 1994, the book offers an unusually moving mixture of supernatural horror and tragic teen melodrama, making it a perfect fit for Flanagan’s unique combination of character-driven drama and creepy horror. Understandably, the release of The Midnight Club’s first teaser has led some viewers to wonder whether the series will be connected to Flanagan’s earlier efforts.
Although The Midnight Club shares some cast members with the Stephen King-influenced miniseries Midnight Mass, it is unlikely the series will be canonically connected to Flanagan’s earlier efforts for Netflix. Set in a hospice, The Midnight Club follows a group of terminally ill young people who pass the time by telling scary stories at night. When they make a pact that the first one of them to die will reach out to the rest of them after death, strange occurrences begin after one of their group passes away. The fact that the cast list doesn’t include many names from The Haunting of Bly Manor and The Haunting of Hill House’s overlapping lineup, this synopsis not mentioning either earlier show means that a canon crossover is unlikely.
Flanagan’s last series, Midnight Mass, didn’t directly reference his two earlier hits either. Midnight Mass’s audacious one-take sequence was reminiscent of The Haunting of Hill House’s even more ambitious one-shot scene, and some cast members appeared in both shows, but Midnight Mass’s supernatural threat was of a different nature. As a result, the relatively grounded show could have lost its realistic tone if it took place in the same fictional universe as The Haunting of Hill House‘s ghost-infested plot.
Similarly, the fact that The Midnight Club is a standalone adaptation of Pike’s novel means it is all the more unlikely that Flanagan would incorporate characters or settings from his earlier shows into the narrative. What is more likely, judging by the synopsis, is that The Midnight Club could feature standalone horror anthology stories, Creepshow-style, for its first few outings, before later episodes focus on the club’s members themselves. However, whether this turns out to be true won’t be clear until The Midnight Club arrives on Netflix in October 2022.
