The Midnight Club': Q&A with creator and executive producer

The Midnight Club': Q&A with creator and executive producer The Midnight Club'c reator and executive producer Mike Flanagan and executive producer Trevor Macy open up about the horror series.

by Alicia Naidoo

11-10-2022 13:42

in Entertainment

The Midnight Club' released on Netflix on 7 October. Image: Supplied.

Netflix's The Midnight Club creator and executive producer Mike Flanagan and executive producer Trevor Macy open up about the horror series.

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THE MIDNIGHT CLUB' PREMIERES ON NETFLIX Netflix released a new horror series titled The Midnight Club on Friday 7 October. The 10-episode series is set at a hospice named Rotterdam Home, where a group of terminally ill teenagers go to die.

The teenagers secretly at midnight tell horror stories. One night they make a pact: The first of them to die would make every effort to contact the others from beyond the grave.

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-- Creator and executive producer Mike Flanagan and executive producer Trevor Macy shared their thoughts in an informative Q&A. Take a look

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ALSO READ: The Midnight Club': All you need to know about new horror series

Q&A WITH CREATOR AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER MIKE FLANAGAN Were you fans of Christopher Pike's books growing up?

Long ago in the 1990s, I was that kid who lived for the monthly Scholastic Book Club flyer. You'd have a little allowance, and you'd get to pick out a handful of books. I always looked for the new Christopher Pike book. He was writing intense thrillers that tackled much darker themes than a lot of other YA books at the time. By the time I got to high school, I had all of the little Pike paperbacks, spines broken and covered in Coca Cola stains and Cheeto dust fingerprints.

What specifically about The Midnight Club made it the Pike book you most wanted to adapt for the screen?

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Of all of Chrisopher Pike's YA books, The Midnight Club was always my favourite. It had a central premise unlike anything else I'd ever come across at the time: a story about young people who were going to die. So much of horror fiction is about the suspense of whether characters you love will live or die.

The Midnight Club took all of that away in the first couple of pages by establishing that all the characters you were about to meet were dying. And they were all my age, at a time when I was not thinking a lot about mortality. The book always had a really strong hold on me because it explores life and death through the eyes of these young people. It's an incredibly thoughtful, deeply sad, and very, very mature look at mortality.

The story-within-a-story format in The Midnight Club has offered the team an opportunity to show many different genres within the show. Can you talk about that component?

That format allowed us to switch gears between a pot boiling, David Fincher-esque, serial killer thriller, to a 1940s, fast-talking black and white film noir - all within an hour. And you never feel disoriented by that gear shift, because we've entrusted these stories to filmmakers who are excited to stretch these different parts of their voices and are able to do that without having to just duplicate what was done before they got here.

More than most shows, this show is a chorus. It's a collaboration. And it benefits from having many different and unique and interesting storytellers working together.

Q&A WITH EXECUTIVE PRODUCER TREVOR MACY You've also managed to include a lot of inspiration and additional stories from across Pike's narrative universe in this show, correct?

The stories these characters tell each other feed their own arcs and character development. It allows us not only to use multiple genres in a way that's very faithful to Pike, but in a way that you don't see on TV very often. These genres can be used as a lens to look at the experience they're having. Why are they telling this story? What does it communicate about them as a character?

You've assembled a top-notch cast of actors to bring this story to life. What makes this group so special?

Our casting directors did a worldwide casting search. We had sides from what we consider the A story, but we also took people for a spin on a couple of the key elements of the B stories, as well. We got to see a little bit of their range. It was an exhaustive process, but we are so happy with the group of people we ended up with. They're a remarkably fresh and diverse crew. We really lucked out.

What do you hope viewers take away from The Midnight Club?

The Midnight Club explores the idea of making the most of the time you have, and reminds us that we're all just stories in the end. When you live on in the heart of someone else, you live on.

ALSO READ: Conversations with a Killer': Netflix's new Jeffrey Dahmer doccie

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