The Midnight Club

The Midnight Club is an American horror mystery-thriller television series created by Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong, with Flanagan serving as showrunner, lead writer and executive producer. The series is set in a hospice and follows eight terminally ill young adults who form "the Midnight Club", meeting up each night to tell each other scary tales; it features an overarching story while also frequently depicting those tales on-screen. Although mostly based on the 1994 novel The Midnight Club by Christopher Pike, the series also adapts short stories from 27 other Pike books featured in the "Midnight Club" tales themselves.

The series stars Iman Benson, Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, Aya Furukawa, Annarah Shephard, William Chris Sumpter, and Sauriyan Sapkota as the eight Midnight Club members, alongside Heather Langenkamp, Zach Gilford, Matt Biedel, and Samantha Sloyan as older adults working at or living near the hospice; in addition to their main characters, cast members also portray the ones featured in the "Midnight Club" tales.

The Midnight Club premiered on Netflix on October 7, 2022. Unlike all three of Flanagan's previous series, it is not a miniseries, and was intended as a limited-run series meant to run for two seasons. However, in December 2022, the series was canceled after one season. Flanagan soon followed it up with a post on Tumblr in which he outlined plans for the second season and tied up the loose ends.

A group of eight close terminally ill young adults resides in the Brightcliffe Home hospice outside of Seattle run by an enigmatic doctor. They meet at midnight every night to tell each other scary stories. They have a pact that the first one to succumb to their disease is responsible for communicating with the others from beyond the grave.

In May 2020, it was announced an adaptation of Christopher Pike's young adult novel The Midnight Club would be created for Netflix by Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong. In an interview for IGN, Flanagan revealed that he was profoundly inspired by Nickelodeon's horror anthology series Are You Afraid of the Dark? On the series' release in October 2022, Flanagan confirmed that the series would also adapt all "28 books" of Pike's, having pitched the series as "'The Midnight Club' — but the stories the kids tell [each other] will be other Christopher Pike books", planning for multiple seasons. On December 1, 2022, Netflix canceled the series after one season. Following its cancellation, Flanagan revealed what was planned for later seasons on his Tumblr, including the ultimate fates of the various characters and answers to the show's lingering mysteries.

Mike Flanagan's sibling Jamie, who worked on The Midnight Club as a writer and co-producer, stated that the club subplot was not part of the writers' original vision, and came to be because of Netflix executives, who wanted a supernatural element to the main plot: "For a while, after Stranger Things, everyone wanted teenage protagonists with some kind of magical powers, and [executives were] like, God, no, this is about children dying in a hospice, they don't have magical powers!"

Flanagan confirmed the cast in a series of tweets on Twitter: Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, Aya Furukawa, Annarah Shephard, William Chris Sumpter, Sauriyan Sapkota as the titular cast, and Heather Langenkamp as the doctor presiding over the hospice of the terminally ill. Zach Gilford and Matt Biedel, and recurring Flanagan collaborators Samantha Sloyan and Robert Longstreet appear in recurring roles. In April 2021, Iman Benson, Larsen Thompson, William B. Davis, Crystal Balint, and Patricia Drak joined the cast.

The project began production on March 15, 2021, in Burnaby, British Columbia, and was planned to conclude on September 8, 2021, but actually finished production on September 10. The first two episodes of the series are directed by Flanagan, and other episodes in the season were helmed by directors Axelle Carolyn, Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, Michael Fimognari, Morgan Beggs, and Viet Nguyen.