‘The Midnight Club’: These Christopher Pike Stories Inspired Mike Flanagan’s Version of the Netflix Series
Netflix dropped one of our most anticipated series of the fall, The Midnight Club, on Oct. 7, and we binged it immediately. The show is based on a novel by Christopher Pike, but showrunner Mike Flanagan weaved some of his other books into the story. These other works by Pike inspired some of The Midnight Club.
[WARNING: This article contains spoilers regarding Netflix’s The Midnight Club.]
‘The Midnight Club’ features teens in a hospice center telling spooky stories
Yes, we know. At first glance, “teens telling spooky stories” sounds a little lame. However, The Midnight Club is far from lame. The series revolves around a group of kids diagnosed with various terminal illnesses. Ilonka, Kevin, Spencer, Anya, Sandra, Cheri, Natsuki, and Kevin live at Briarcliffe Hospice. Every night, they sneak into the library at midnight and take turns telling a scary story. Flanagan shows each of the stories play out on screen, starring the characters in the group as different people in every tale.
While Pike categorized the 1994 novel as “horror,” it leans far harder into the drama genre. Only a couple of the stories the group tells in the novel qualify as scary. Thankfully, Flanagan smartly uses ideas from Pike’s more terrifying novels in the series and gives us the chills we crave.
These are the other Christopher Pike novels Mike Flanagan uses in the series
If you were a teen in the late ’80s and into the ’90s and loved to read horror novels, you definitely read books by Pike. He ruled the young adult horror section at the library with titles like Gimme a Kiss, Monster, and Whisper of Death. Flanagan had plenty of content to choose from when deciding which stories the teens at Brightcliffe would tell every night in The Midnight Club.
Kevin’s story revolves around a reluctant serial killer named Dusty. Voices force Dusty to kill certain people, but things come to a head when the voices give him the name of his latest crush, Sheila. Flanagan plucked the story straight from Pike’s 1994 novel, The Wicked Heart.
A mixture of Pike’s novels, The Starlight Crystal and See You Later, make up Amesh’s story. See You Later features a young man who gets help from a strange couple from the future, world domination, and video games. Amesh weaves his tale with the name “The Starlight Crystal” for the video game that plays a vital role in his story.
Spencer’s Midnight Club contribution focuses on a young man who somehow stumbles upon a VCR (it’s the ’90s, ok?) that records a news broadcast from the future every night while he’s asleep. Oh, and there’s also this whole aspect of the human race falling to robot overlords in the future. If you want more details, check out Pike’s novel, The Eternal Enemy.
Natsuki’s creepy tale involves a girl running away from home and picking up some seemingly innocent hitchhikers. (But are they ever really innocent in television shows and movies?) It’s Flanagan’s take on Road to Nowhere. Sandra’s Midnight Club story brings Pike’s book, Gimme a Kiss, to the small-screen. It creates a tongue-in-cheek take on the innocence of the ’90s.
The final chapter in ‘The Midnight Club’ belongs to Ilonka
Ilonka’s story takes two episodes of The Midnight Club to get through and wraps up in the final episode. It features a young witch named Imani and her ability to see the future by gazing into a lake. Right before her mother dies, she tells Imani never to look into the lake at night but doesn’t get a chance to explain why. Pike’s novel Witch tells a similar tale but with a few name changes.
However, when Ilonka becomes too choked up to finish the story after everything she’s experienced, her friends in The Midnight Club offer their own additions to her tale. It creates a sweet story involving all the members of their club in their own ways.
Check out The Midnight Club, streaming exclusively on Netflix.
