“This is not the first time that I tried to adapt The Midnight Club,” Mike Flanagan says. His new Netflix series, based on a book by YA novelist Christopher Pike, will debut on October 7, but Flanagan’s original attempt to create was a long, strange odyssey itself, stretching all the way back to the early ’90s and involving a supposedly reclusive author and a sorrowful backstory that few have ever heard.
In 1994, Pike first published the book about a group of terminally ill teenagers in hospice care who gather every night to exchange frightening stories. They also make a shared promise: If/when any of them die, they will return in some way to prove there is life beyond the one being cut short. One of the book’s early fans was Flanagan, but back then the eventual force behind the Netflix hits The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass was just another of Pike’s voracious teen readers. When he was a college student around three years later, nourishing long-distance Hollywood dreams from Towson University in Maryland, he became convinced that The Midnight Club could be his first feature film.
Flanagan wrote a screenplay, and even drafted a business plan, offering friends and family a chance to invest their own money in his low-budget indie. Once it was all in place, he sent the proposal to Pike’s publisher. “They sent me a cease and desist letter,” he says.
That seemed to be the end of it. Flanagan never made an adaptation of The Midnight Club, but no one else did either, and he never forgot the impression that even the cover made, with its terrified kids and the hooded figure who loomed before them. “The Midnight Club was a particular shock to me as a teenager because I thought I was getting this pulpy little YA novella that would be about a spooky Grim Reaper or something,” he says. “But no, it was about teenagers having to reconcile with terminal diseases and with death. And it didn’t pull its punches there either. It was a real lesson in how you could use genre to talk about very serious things. This is before I’d kind of graduated to Stephen King. I was coming right off of John Bellairs [The House With a Clock in Its Walls] and R.L. Stine [the Goosebumps series]. And so this really blew my hair back.”
Pike’s books were notably edgier and more daring than others published for young readers, and included elements that could be lurid, vivid, and violent. “It’s like, oh, my God, this is heavy,” Flanagan says. “Some of the first real conversations I had with my contemporaries about death and love and sex and alcohol and drugs and all the rest of it came out of the fact that we were reading Pike books.” Those illicit qualities made the books into must-reads for many young readers at the time. “We always felt like we were getting away with something,” Flanagan says.
Two decades passed, and Flanagan gradually built his reputation as a writer-director with 2013’s Oculus, the 2016 stalker thriller Hush, and the King adaptations Gerald’s Game (2017), and Doctor Sleep (2019). The shows he created for Netflix took him to another level, and a few years ago he decided to revisit The Midnight Club, not as a movie but as an anthology TV show cocreated with writer-producer Leah Fong.
Their new approach was to make it an adaptation of not just one Christopher Pike novel. The late-night yarns the kids unspool for each other, they decided, would be adaptations of other Pike books—complete with all the baggage they carry about not fitting in, struggling to find love, and feeling lost and alone. The show is a period piece, set in the far-off time of 1994, but some things never change.
“You take these teenage issues that are heightened to begin with and then you add mortality to the mix and you have a coming of age that is so acute and immediate,” Fong says. These kids are just facing the prospect of their own end long before most people realize they have to. “That’s what we all do,” she says. “All of us writers, we’re creating—we’re trying to leave behind something and that’s what these kids are doing with their stories. It’s what gets us through everything. They’re creating their own ghosts, something that they can leave behind after they’re gone.”
Adding numerous other Pike titles to the mix made The Midnight Club more complicated to pull off, but Trevor Macy, Flanagan’s producing partner at Intrepid Pictures, said they were necessary to broaden the scope of the series. Each one stands as its own mini movie within the framework of the show, reflecting the mindset of the ailing kid who tells it.
“It’s like having agency over the last days of your life—or what you think are the last days of your life,” he says. “These other works of Pike’s reflect the range of reactions that each of the storytellers has about facing down their own deaths. Sometimes that’s humor, and sometimes it’s shouting into the void, and sometimes it’s bleak, but it’s always relatable.”
Among the other Pike novels that will be featured are Witch (1990), about a girl with mystical abilities who tries to prevent her catastrophic visions from coming true; Gimme a Kiss (1988), in which a bullied student fakes her own death as part of a twisted revenge scheme; The Wicked Heart (1993), which follows the trail of a high school serial killer whose preferred weapon is a hammer; and Road to Nowhere (1993), in which a heartbroken young woman running away from her life picks up two eerie hitchhikers.
Doing all this would, of course, require multiple blessings from Pike. “I didn’t know anything about him other than I loved the books as a kid and then wondered where he went,” Flanagan says. “The guy was putting out two books a year, and he just vanished. I was always curious as to why.”
Pike had developed a reputation in Hollywood for refusing any and all adaptations. He was perceived as a recluse. Or maybe he wasn’t real at all, but just a fake name invented for book covers, like Nancy Drew’s Carolyn Keene.
It turns out he is real. And he wishes people didn’t believe some of these things.
Flanagan found him on Facebook, which is where Vanity Fair found him too. Just a few minutes after sending a message, the phone rings: “Hi, this is Christopher Pike…”
Pike is 66 now, and lives in Santa Barbara. He’s still writing, but not at the breakneck pace of the ’90s. His most recent book is 2015’s Strange Girl, and while he enjoys his privacy, he’s hardly reclusive, happily talking at length about other TV shows and books after answering questions about his own work. Christopher Pike is a pen name, and his real one is Kevin McFadden. But he answers to Christopher, his middle name. He says it’s probably best to refer to him most of the time as his pseudonym, since that’s how readers think of him.
Pike doesn’t harbor an aversion to Hollywood, although he thinks he knows why people in the industry think that. In 1996, NBC made a TV movie from his book Fall Into Darkness, which he thought was poorly done, and cut away too much of his story. “The main thing is I wanted [the books] to be adapted in a way that my fans would be happy with,” he says. “It sounds maybe conceited to say that turned me off to all of Hollywood, but it really did turn me off for a long time.”
NBC wanted to collaborate again, but he says he turned them down. “After Fall Into Darkness, the network was really angry at me that I didn’t let Chain Letter be adapted,” he says. And so began the rumor that Christopher Pike didn’t allow adaptations.
“People would write sometimes, but very seldom. And they would say, ‘Now, we know that you don’t want anything to do with Hollywood and this and that.’ And I hadn’t made that decision,” he says.
Pike still got plenty of messages from adoring readers who had grown up with his words. One day, one of those messages was from a fan with a Netflix production deal.
Flanagan wrote Pike in 2019. The Haunting of Hill House had debuted just a few months before, and he was in post-production on Doctor Sleep: “I sent him a message that just said, ‘I’m a huge fan. I don’t know for sure that I would’ve pursued the career and the life that I pursued if I hadn’t fallen so in love with the genre and with horror fiction at the age that I did, and that was all because of your work. I’ve been making some TV shows for Netflix and I think they might really dig a proper YA show if you’re interested.’ We hopped on the phone—and he was very skeptical of it.”
Pike remembers being restrained. “I didn’t react too much,” he says. “What happened is I just wrote, ‘Oh, thank you for your kind words. I’m glad you enjoyed the book.’ And then my girlfriend said, ‘Are you crazy…?’” They happened to be in the middle of watching The Haunting of Hill House.
That first exchange turned into a series of longer ones, and soon The Midnight Club adaptation was finally happening. Pike was surprisingly less resistant to the idea of incorporating his other books as the stories the kids tell each other. That’s how the idea of The Midnight Club was born.
The lead character of the series, Ilonka (played by Iman Benson), is based on a real girl that Pike knew in the early ’90s. She had been a reader of his, and when she became terminally ill, her parents reached out to the author, hoping he might meet with her as a final wish. They lived on opposite coasts, but Pike says he wrote to her and spoke to her on the phone. She told him that at night, she and other kids in the hospital would gather together for a book club to discuss his stories.
As a tribute to her and her friends, he came up with The Midnight Club, although he created new stories for them to tell each other, rather than use the meta-concept of them discussing his own books. Although Pike says he offered to share chapters that were works in progress, she refused, preferring to wait for the finished book.
Regretfully, he says, she didn’t live to read it.
Flanagan knows this is a delicate part of the adaptation. The show is about fear and tragedy, but it couldn’t be weepy. It also couldn’t be flippant, although people facing the worst often use irreverence to cope. “There were moments when I wanted to make sure we were being as sensitive as possible,” Flanagan says. “And a lot of the people in the writers room and even the cast on set who had been through it said, ‘Actually, I think we want to get this joke in there. We want to get this moment in there. This is what I said. This is what my friend said. This is what my doctor said.’”
So there’s laughter in this show, in addition to scares. There’s also young romance, made all the more urgent because neither Ilonka or her crush, Kevin (Igby Rigney), know how long ever-after might be.
Heather Langenkamp, best known for surviving Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, costars as Dr. Georgina Stanton, the founder of Brightcliffe Hospice and the lead doctor there. “The hospice has a very colorful history, the building itself. And the kids tell all sorts of stories, some of which they claim aren’t made up,” Flanagan says. “There’s a rumor that passes from each class of kids who comes in about a living shadow that prowls the halls of Brightcliffe. Some of the kids speculate that it might be death itself. And some of the kids, especially toward the end of their lives, talk about this thing, getting closer and closer to them.”
As they continue their nightly meetings, strange things start to happen at the facility. “The thing is we aren’t really sure what we can believe, especially given some of the medications the kids are on, some of which can cause all sorts of hallucinations, waking nightmares, and things like that,” Flanagan says. “Then ultimately, there’s another mystery to the hospice that involves a patient many years ago who claims to have discovered something in the building that cured her and she walked away healthy. That is a mystery that animates the kids for a long time too.”
A common theme in Flanagan’s work is the exploration of faith—and in The Midnight Club, belief can be a genuine way to heal, at least emotionally, if not physically.
“The engine of the first season for us is these kids really want some kind of reassurance that their lives aren’t really over,” he says. “They believe the bonds they formed are strong enough that one of them could come back and tell the others, ‘Don’t be afraid. There’s something else on the other side.’”
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