On Friday, Netflix launched its latest scary TV series for spooky season: The Midnight Club, a haunted house teen horror story from Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong, the former the mastermind behind some of TV’s most terrifying yet moving offerings of late — including The Haunting of Hill House which was described as “one of the most truly chilling [shows] of all time,” and the doomsday series Midnight Mass.
Within a few days of its launch, the series is already incredibly popular. Netflix have reported that it’s already number five on the platform’s top TV shows worldwide (it’s 3rd in the US and UK). Meanwhile, online, horror fans are obsessing. “6 mins into The Midnight Club and I’ll be damned Mike Flanagan you have done it again” posted @kelsily, while @thehippieghoul wrote “Flanagan can do no wrong”. And like much of his previous offerings, such as the melancholy Hill House follow up, queer horror The Haunting of Bly Manor, fans are enjoying having queer characters within main roles: “If there’s one thing Mike Flanagan loves besides lengthy monologues about the meaning of life or the power of stories, it’s gay people,” posted @paighoe.
The number of jump scares, however, has been controversial. “The jump scares in The Midnight Club, Jesus Christ i’m only on the first episode” posted @thanefallow, while @gaysinmedia opined their “heart can’t take the jump scares lmao”, adding that it made them want to stop watching. While much of Mike’s past work opted for extended feelings of dread and suspense to fuel the disturbing vibes, The Midnight Club is far more visceral from the get go. The first episode, in fact, has already broken the Guinness World Record for the most scripted jump scares in a single episode of television. Specifically, 21 jump scares in total.
The restless series opens with Ilonka (played by Iman Benson), an 18-year-old girl in the mid-90s ready to go off to college, whose plans are disrupted when she is diagnosed with thyroid cancer. At the same time, Ilonka begins to see visions of harrowing dead people and an old mansion that, upon investigation, she discovers is a real place called Brightcliffe Home, a hospice for terminally ill teens. Naturally, like the good horror main character she is, she enrols at the hospice to discover more, specifically about one mysterious patient in the 1960s who reportedly was cured after disappearing into the creepily gothic building’s corridors for a month. While there, she bonds with the other residents who all have a pact that, when the first one of them dies, they will do everything in their power to contact them from beyond the grave. The group also meet at midnight to tell ghost stories. As each episode a new teen tells a sordid tale, and Ilonka gets closer to discovering the truth behind Brightcliffe Home, the horror increasingly leaves the safety of the fictional bedtime story and pervades the corridors.
While jump scares happen throughout the first episode and series overall, the vast majority happen within one specific scene of a J-horror-inspired tale told by Natsuki, one of the residents. Happening in rapid succession, almost rhythmically, one could argue these lose their potency and even get annoying as you wait for the scene to finally move on. It’s the equivalent of walking through a horror maze and a traffic jam builds, meaning you’re stuck next to an actor dressed as a decrepit old man, screaming inches from your face and continuously revving a chainsaw. What is at first terrifying then quickly becomes a bit like, ‘are we done here?’
In a meta twist, Natsuki’s story is critiqued by another of the resident teens, Spencer. “Anyone can bang pots and pans behind someone’s head. That’s not scary, that’s just startling. And it’s lazy as fuck,” he says. Perhaps this is a reflection of Mike’s own view. Speaking to Deadline about the scene, he said: “I thought, ‘We’re going to do all of them at once, and then if we do it right, a jump scare will be rendered meaningless for the rest of the series.’ It’ll just destroy it. Kill it finally until it’s dead, But that didn’t happen. They were like, ‘Great! More [scares]!’”
“My whole career I completely shat on jump scares as a concept, and I wanted to make sure it was pinned to me, too, as much as it is to the show, to Netflix, and all of us who have inflicted this on everyone,” he continued. “Now, I have my name in the Guinness Book of World Records for jump scares, which means next time I get the note, I can say, ‘You know, as the current world record holder for jump scares, I don’t think we need one here.’”
The jump scare, of course, has its place. When completely unexpected and abrupt (the reveal of the red-faced demon in Insidious is scientifically considered the scariest moment in horror history) or when the suspense of a scare is dragged out for so long that it could happen at any moment, such as the always-around-the-corner Ghostface in Scream.
By destroying the power the jump scare holds early on in his series — by making every horrific face that suddenly pops up on screen feel expected, almost derivative — The Midnight Club takes the horror away from the visible and visceral ‘what’ of it all and focuses it on the much more foreboding and disturbing ‘why’. Like the ghost stories the teens take turns telling in each of the episodes, the jump scares become distractions to the increasingly nihilistic audience. The true horror unfolds across the series within the measures people will take to get what they desire the most, and that’s something far more based in reality. After all, you may have a nightmare about the demonic figure you saw for a split second on screen, but what will stop you from sleeping in the first place is the lingering thoughts about whether you too would do those same depraved actions if you were in that situation.