The horror blockbuster duo Mike Flanagan and Netflix kickstarts Spookoctober with a bang! The creative genius behind blockbuster supernatural shows like The Haunting of Hill House (2018) , The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) and the recent Midnight Mass (2021) is back with another thrilling supernatural outing ‘The Midnight Club’ and this time the horror auteur is already breaking world records.
During the show’s panel at New York Comic Con, it was revealed that the show has broken the world record for most number of scripted jump scares in a single episode for a television series. The Guinness World Record certificate was presented by official Guinness World Record Adjudicator Andrew Glass during the panel on Thursday. As per Netflix, the show’s jump scares in one episode of the upcoming series total 21. Now that’s some number!
This record is quite surprising considering the fact that Mike Flanagan’s horror isn’t exactly the regular jump-scare horror we are so used to seeing. Flanagan is famous for writing his shows with a touch of affection, love and tenderness with heartbreaking backstories.
Flanagan feels jump scares are a lazy genre trope. So, for The Midnight Club he said, it was a creative decision to poke fun at the trope all at once because the executives pushed him for more jump scare horror. “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.” The first episode of the show thereby follows a series of rapid jump-scares that are meant to poke fun at the jump-scare trope.
The Midnight Club is created by Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong, with Flanagan serving as showrunner and executive producer. The show is an adaptation of the 1994 novel of the same name written by Christopher Pike. The show follows a group of seven close terminally ill young adults residing in the Rotterdam Home hospice run by an enigmatic doctor. They meet at midnight every night to narrate sinister stories to each other. One night they make a pact that the first one to succumb to their disease is responsible for communicating with the others from beyond the grave. After one of them dies, things get out of hand and turn bizzare.
The Midnight Club stars Iman Benson, Adia, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, Aya Furukawa, Annarah Shephard, William Chris Sumpter, and Sauriyan Sapkota as the patients. Heather Langenkamp, Zach Gilford, Matt Biedel and Samantha Sloyan have recurring parts in the show as well. The 10 episode series will drop all its episodes on one go and will be available on Netflix India from October 7th, 2022. Now if you’re a horror junkie like all of us, set your alarm right away and get ready to be spooked in succession.
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