Flanagan’s adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass have brought his work to more mainstream audiences and have created a revival of gothic horror. Now he has more in the works for Netflix after signing a deal with the platform, including an adaptation of The Fall of The House of Usher and the upcoming release of The Midnight Club, based on the YA horror classic of the same name by author Christopher Pike.

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In a recent discussion with Vanity Fair, the director discussed how he had previously attempted to adapt the book in the early 1990s. At the time Flanagan was a college student and avid fan of Pike’s work. The Midnight Club resonated with him so much that he wrote a screenplay, created a business plan, and asked friends and family to invest in his passion project. Then he sent his proposal to Pike’s publisher. “They sent me a cease and desist letter,” The director said before explaining why the book had such an impact on him. “The Midnight Club was a particular shock to me as a teenager because I thought I was getting this pulpy little YA novella that would be about a spooky Grim Reaper or something. But no, it was about teenagers having to reconcile with terminal diseases and with death. And it didn’t pull its punches there either. It was a real lesson in how you could use genre to talk about very serious things.”

Now, after building up his reputation and an impressive portfolio of work, Flanagan is not only adapting The Midnight Club but is also incorporating adaptations of other Pike novels into the series as the stories that the group tell each other. Vanity Fair also spoke to the author himself. Flanagan and Pike connected in 2019 and despite Pike’s reservations, he was persuaded by Flanagan’s dedication and understanding of the balance of topics dealt with in the book. The book is a deeply personal work of Pike’s, written about a fan of his work that he came into contact with in the ’90s. She was terminally ill and told Pike that she and other patients would gather and have book club meetings to discuss his work. Unfortunately, she was never able to read The Midnight Club and passed away before its completion.

The main character of the book, Ilonka, is based on her. The topic is a delicate one and Flanagan explains the aim of the first season. “… these kids really want some kind of reassurance that their lives aren’t really over,” he says. “They believe the bonds they formed are strong enough that one of them could come back and tell the others, ‘Don’t be afraid. There’s something else on the other side.’”

The Midnight Club tells the story of 8 teens in a hospice for the terminally ill. Each night at midnight they gather to tell each other stories of the morbid and the macabre. One night they make a vow that whoever is the first to die has to come back and prove the existence of the supernatural to the others. The main cast for Flanagan’s adaptation is Adia, Igby Rigney (Midnight Mass), Ruth Codd (The Fall of The House of Usher), Aya Furukawa (The Baby-Sitters Club), Annarah Shephard (Midnight Mass), William Chris Sumpter (Power), and Sauriyan Sapkota (The Fall of The House of Usher) as the Midnight Club members, and A Nightmare On Elm Street franchise star Heather Langenkamp.

The Midnight Club comes to Netflix on October 7th, 2022.

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Source: Vanity Fair