Heather Langenkamp Says Filming Mike Flanagan’s ‘The Midnight Club’ the ‘Most Fun in Her Career’
The new Netflix series The Midnight Club, starring Heather Langenkamp, hit the streaming platform on Oct. 7. Mike Flanagan, the showrunner behind Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Haunting of Bly Manor, takes the helm, and he was inspired by Christopher Pike’s novel of the same name. The series follows a group of terminally ill teens living at Brightcliffe Hospice. Horror icon, Langenkamp, stars as Brightcliffe’s head doctor, Georgia Stanton.
Heather Langenkamp’s role as Dr. Stanton feels like a callback
Pike’s horror novels became popular in the ’90s, just a few years after Langenkamp took on the role of Nancy in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The younger viewers might not have caught the subtle references, but Dr. Stanton’s role as a doctor feels familiar.
In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the teens experiencing Freddy Krueger’s attacks in their dreams stay at a psychiatric hospital. The setting in The Midnight Club for the teens feels like a callback to Dream Warriors, and even Langenkamp herself felt similar.
“That movie was so great. And yet her role as this therapist who is helping these kids through their suicide attempts, it never felt deep enough. Then it was kind of a little like our group therapy seemed a little superficial sometimes even. But this time, I just feel like everybody’s story is so deep. Like, we really know the kids. We really know their backgrounds,” Langenkamp told us at New York Comic-Con.
She continued, “In a film like an hour and a half long film, we just can’t go that deep into people’s lives. So in a lot of ways, I love that the audience will know the kids really, really well. Right. And they’ll know their nuances.”
Heather Langenkamp says ‘The Midnight Club’ was ‘the most fun she’s had in her career’
After her time as a teen star in horror movies, Langenkamp’s appearance in The Midnight Club feels a little bit like she’s passing the torch. However, the scream queen loved her time working with Flanagan and the rest of the cast. We asked Langenkamp what it was like coming back to the horror genre that expertly weaves emotion in beside the scares.
“It was so much fun, and my character does not get to do all the cool, like, Midnight Club storytelling and all of that. So I was a little jealous of my costars that they all had these. But I get to appear in their stories, and I get to dress up, and that I get to play like a detective, I get to play a cop. And so being in their stories was almost the most fun that I had ever in my career,” Langkamp told Showbiz Cheat Sheet.
Playing the devil might be the highlight of her career
Each member of the group tells a different story each night when they meet in The Midnight Club. Anya’s (Ruth Codd) story involves a cameo from the devil herself, played by Langenkamp. Covered in tattoos representing the souls she’s taken before, Langenkamp shines in the role.
“You know, definitely playing the devil was a high point of my career, and I love it. Yeah. So, I know the devil has all the tattoos. They’re supposed to represent all the souls,” Langenkamp explained.
However, she actually wanted more tattoos than the ones that made it into the final cut.
“I had talked to Mike. I really wanted her to have tattoos because I thought the devil would probably have some great-looking tattoos. Ideally, I would have had them everywhere, but that was not going to happen. So I made them like starting at the neck down, we had some serpents and some snakes, but then we had these souls, and that was the idea of the art department.”
Check out all 10 episodes of The Midnight Club starring Heather Langenkamp, exclusively streaming on Netflix.
