A killer friendship! Mike Flanagan‘s horror universe continues to grow with Netflix’s The Midnight Club.
“A group of seven close terminally ill young adults resides in the Rotterdam Home hospice run by an enigmatic doctor. They meet at midnight every night to tell each other scary stories,” a synopsis of the upcoming series reads. “One night they make a pact that the first one to succumb to their disease is responsible for communicating with the others beyond the grave. After one of them dies, bizarre occurrences begin.”
Flanagan has previously been involved with supernatural shows including The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass. Netflix also collaborated with the filmmaker on several movies such as Before I Wake, Hush and Gerald’s Game. The Massachusetts native is currently adapting Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher for the streaming giants as well.
After Midnight Mass debuted in September 2021, Flanagan opened up about how developing the story helped him address his struggle with alcoholism.
“I let this go on far too long, quick to deny it was a problem even as it led to increasingly self-destructive behavior. It cost friendships, it damaged relationships, and it would have killed me – or worse, it would have killed someone else,” he wrote in an essay for Bloody Disgusting at the time. “That was always the nightmare scenario, and that was why my most personal story – Midnight Mass, the story I could never entirely put down – opened the way it did. It faded in on my worst, most ingrained anxiety: not that I would die because of my drinking, but that I would kill someone else and live.”
The director noted that producing his projects came with its own sets of challenges over the years. “The Haunting of Hill House was a surprise hit. It had been a grueling production experience, in many ways the opposite of Midnight Mass. The show had nearly killed a lot of us,” he continued. “I’d lost more than 40 pounds while shooting, every day was a battle, sometimes for the bare essentials, and often fought without hope or witness. While the final product is something I will always be enormously proud of, it remains the worst professional experience of my life.”
For Flanagan, bringing Midnight Mass to life was the “best experience” of his life.
“I think back on those various past versions of myself, all of whom touched and shaped this story at different times along the way, with their anger, their fear, their addiction, their existential crises. All of those versions of me are in conversation with each other on this show – the altar boy, the atheist, the scientist, the believer, the moderate, the student, the parent, the child, the alcoholic – and I am grateful for all of them,” he wrote. “It’s a funny and beautiful thing when a story takes on a life of its own. It hasn’t happened often in my experience, but man oh man, it happened here.”
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