The Midnight Club

The Midnight Club is a surprisingly thoughtful rumination on what it means to die, although its deeper truths come wrapped in the bright candy coating of a teen drama.

The Midnight Club continues Mike Flanagan’s ability to creep and scare the pants off viewers while building stories with great characters. The varied tones of the club’s stories should bring an interesting wrinkle to Flanagan’s usual dark and tense style.

That, here, the grief and loss is for the characters’ own futures demands a delicacy that Flanagan and Fong possess; it also demands to be matched by a horror appropriately outsized and scary, and they deliver that, too.

The value in The Midnight Club lies not in its central mystery but rather with its eight members, whose personal stories (both imagined and experienced) are thought-provoking, emotionally charged and likely to stick with viewers for some time.

Not all of the stories contained in The Midnight Club work equally well, and a few purposely don’t really work at all. Collectively, however, they mount a compelling case for why stories matter and why scary stories in particular do, inelegant or imperfect though they may be — and along the way, draw some jolts, a few gasps and a great many tears.

A departure in some ways and classic Flanagan in others, The Midnight Club is another affecting entry into the prolific filmmaker’s array of stories that make us think differently about mortality and morality.

The show only has a period setting because that's when the book The Midnight Club came out, not because it's integral to the story. And the dialogue actively works to undermine the setting. ... But that's a relatively minor complaint on a show that does the big things right. Flanagan and his collaborators have once again delivered an emotionally potent horror drama, this time adding in a YA element to keep things fresh.

The Midnight Club isn’t particularly terrifying, but it’s satisfyingly creepy. More than that, it’s unusually intense for any show — especially one catering to YA audiences — about the topics of life and death.

It’s unlikely to be anyone’s favorite of the Flanagan projects. However, it could be a new horror fan’s first. And, perhaps more importantly, it could be something that really speaks to a young person who has been forced to deal with death in an unfair way, looking for a story to help them figure out how to write their own.

An engaging, if uneven, YA series that rests its premise on the palliative power of storytelling. ... Overall, though, and especially as an October Netflix offering for those famished for some Flanagan horror fare, The Midnight Club is a worthy binge-watch.

The Midnight Club smartly uses the trappings of horror, and other modes of genre fiction, to explore the power of storytelling as a means of reckoning with the unfathomable.