“Midnight Mass” and “The Haunting of Bly Manor” creator Mike Flanagan released his younger-skewing episodic anthology series “The Midnight Club” on Netflix on Friday.
The ten-episode first season left some lingering questions about the fate of the terminally ill teens at Brightcliffe Hospice and various story threads that came up in the run.
Whilst a renewal order hasn’t been issued as yet, Flanagan has confirmed he has a plan for multiple seasons of the series and Netflix has optioned around 28 of Christopher Pike’s books which serve as the basis for individual episodes. Speaking at a press conference last week (via Variety), he said:
“This was designed to be ongoing. I don’t know if it will. We’ll see how it goes and we probably won’t know for another month or so what Netflix wants to do. But it was very much designed to continue. Pike has 80 books, so we have a lot of unused material to pull from… We also didn’t answer some of the bigger questions of the season. Those answers exist, but were meant to be for the next season. If there isn’t one, I’ll put them up on Twitter. Then we’ll at least all be able to talk about it.”
One of the reasons Flanagan says he was drawn to this was the ability to have a work he can show his eldest child, 11-year-old Rigby, and that Pike was an author unafraid to have darker stuff in his books for teens:
“He [Pike] always included themes in his books that felt very adult. He didn’t pull his punches with violence, with heavy things that kids are really thinking about: intense bullying, suicide, sex, drugs – all of that was fair game in the Pike world. And one of the things that my contemporaries and I loved about the books was that he wasn’t sugarcoating things. So while there was always a sense of bearing that younger audience in mind, we were also very careful not to condescend to them or to try to police the places the show would go… If you don’t treat them with respect, what are you doing?'”
“The Midnight Club” is now available on Netflix. Flanagan is next working on his Edgar Allan Poe adaptation “The Fall of the House of Usher” which has already wrapped filming and is expected out next year.
