Pike's official FB page has a new co-admin, John Weir. John's a UK guy with (I think) a background in journalism. He posted this cool interview with Pike from around 1998-99.
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Hopefully John avoids the page's curse of being unable to log in for six months at a time.
True to his word, shortly after The Midnight Club's cancellation, Mike Flanagan hit Tumblr to post a summary of what would have been the show's second season.
My biggest disappointment is that we left so many story threads open, holding them back for the hypothetical second season, which is always a gamble.
So I'm writing this blog as our official second season, so you can know what might have been, learn the fates of your favorite characters, and know the answers to those dangling story threads from the first season.
So for those of you who want to know what we were planning to do, here's a look at what would have been season 2!
I'm very disappointed that Netflix has decided not to pursue a second season of THE MIDNIGHT CLUB.
My biggest disappointment is that we left so many story threads open, holding them back for the hypothetical second season, which is always a gamble.
So I'm writing this blog as our official second season, so you can know what might have been, learn the fates of your favorite characters, and know the answers to those dangling story threads from the first season.
So for those of you who want to know what we were planning to do, here's a look at what would have been season 2! (Source)
I thought the show was decent--good production values, good cast, decent writing--and it's clear the writers did a nice homage to Pike's work... but I found the episodes very draggy, and the long mytharc about the cult was kind of tiresome. My mind drifted during most episodes. An anthology series would've been nice--each episode a complete standalone, featuring a different Pike book. Like Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone, but Pike.
Ah well. Worth noting, Flanagan still holds the rights to Season of Passage and wants to turn it into a feature film.
If you head over to Tor Books' website, you'll find a lot of essays on Pike's work, and I'll be posting links to all of them, but here's the latest, from Alissa Burger.
[In Pike's books] characters regularly find themselves contending with the lingering evils of the past, visitors from the future (both malevolent and well-meaning), the depths of the cosmos, and complex spirituality. Three of Pike’s novels that tackle some of these thorny issues are See You Later (1990), Whisper of Death (1991), and The Wicked Heart (1993), though there are several others addressed in previous columns that are part of this larger discussion as well, including Chain Letter 2: The Ancient Evil (1992), Road to Nowhere (1993), The Eternal Enemy (1993), The Immortal (1993), and the Last Vampire series (1994-2013).
In Pike’s universe, the past is never really past, with echoes of evil that carry down through the years, influencing and shaping the events of the present. (Source)
Sad news day, people: The Midnight Club has been given the chop. Via Variety:
Netflix’s “The Midnight Club” has been canceled after one season, Variety has learned.
The cancellation comes on the heels of executive producers Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy exiting their overall deal at Netflix for a new pact with Amazon Studios.
[...] The series marked not just Flanagan and Macy’s first foray into young-adult content, but also their first show that was intended to be a multi-season project. However, Flanagan had already mentally prepared for the idea it might not be renewed, and told press ahead of its premiere he would share his Season 2 plans if “Midnight Club” was scrapped. (Source)
Sucks for us, and for Pike. But remember: Flanagan still intends to bring Season of Passage to the big screen.
The PikeCast has come out of hibernation to check out The Midnight Club TV series. And Becca's back, too! First ep in the mini-series dropped today. I have no idea if they're going back to the books, but I'm told that's the plan.
According to Variety, Mike Flanagan promises answers to the show's dangling questions, even if the show isn't renewed. At a recent media conference Flanagan, along with his producing partner Trevor Macy, also had unsurprisingly good things to say about our guy:
While Netflix has not yet renewed “Midnight Club” for a second season, Flanagan has a plan for multiple seasons of the series, which follows the teens as they live out the end of their short lives at the hospice and share scary stories to help them cope with the inevitable, all while supernatural forces loom around them.
“He agreed to let me take a shot with the show and the pitch was, we’ll do ‘The Midnight Club’ — but the stories the kids tell will be other Christopher Pike books, and he really liked that idea,” Flanagan told a group of reporters at a “Midnight Club” press conference last week. “And Netflix ended up optioning a pile of Christopher Pike’s stuff — 28 books.”
[...] “But the other thing, though — and this is something I learned from Pike — was that he always included themes in his books that felt very adult,” Flanagan continued. “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. And that was something that separated Pike from his contemporaries.”
“And it still does, by the way,” Flanagan’s Intrepid Pictures producing partner, Trevor Macy, added. “I think he treats his protagonists with more respect than a lot of YA authors do today. We tried to keep that ethos top of mind for the series, because the show lends itself to that, because they’re going through the worst thing anybody is ever going to go through. If you don’t treat them with respect, what are you doing?”
[...] On plans for a second season:
Flanagan: 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. (Source)
Head on over for the full write up!
Brand new interview with Pike over at The Daily Beast, and it's great. Some choice bits:
“I remember [Flanagan] wanted Monster, Whisper of Death, and Remember Me,” says Pike, who declined because he wants to preserve these novels for potential future adaptations. “So I set aside 10 that he could use that were appropriate to the story. Like Witch, Road to Nowhere—you read these books, and it's obvious why they would be part of the Midnight Club, why the kids would be talking about them at midnight, if they were in a hospice and they were suffering a terminal disease.”
[...] “I don’t know if the books would be the same,”says Pike, when I ask him if he feels like there’s a uniquely ’90s generational quality to his books, or if they had been written during another era. “There was something right then about the internet just starting. No one used the phrase ‘social media’… and we didn't have people walking around with cell phones. It was a different time, and I think the books fit the time.”
[...] When I tell him that I read his books around 12 or 13, he asks, thoughtfully and without judgment, if my parents knew (they didn’t). “I began to realize pretty quickly that there were kids out there that were your age or even younger [reading the books], and that kind of scared me,” he admits. “Maybe scared is the wrong word—it inhibits you a little bit, because that's not the audience that's supposed to be reading the book.”
[...] He’s working on three novels, two of which are YA. “I’ve been sort of storing them up,” he says. “One of them’s part of a series. I envision that the series could be anything from three to 10 books.” (Source)
Goes without saying, the whole article is worth a read.
It's here! I could post excerpts from a bunch of reviews, but I am lazy. Instead you get the Rotten Tomatoes link and word that The Midnight Club is currently doing 86% on there. Consensus seems to be it's The Breakfast Club with a bit o' horror.
Pike has yet to post anything on his Facebook page, the poor dude's having tech problems again.
Media are reporting that the first episode set a world record for jump scares. Says Variety:
The “Midnight Mass” and “Haunting of Hill House” mastermind [Mike Flanagan] packed 21 separate instances of the classic horror trope into the premiere of his latest Netflix series, “The Midnight Club,” a tally so high it actually breaks the Guinness World Record for “most scripted jump scares in a single television episode.”
A Guinness World Record official presented Flanagan and Co. their certificate for the achievement during the “Midnight Club’s” New York Comic Con panel Thursday night, which included a preview of the premiere episode ahead of the show’s Friday launch. (Source)
Good bit of PR, but I hope the promise of jump scares isn't a misrepresentation of the show as a whole. People might end up disappointed.
Have you seen it? Whatcha think?!
More stuff soon!
What's On Netflix comes through with the goods! We now know which Pike books are being adapted in The Midnight Club's first season, thanks to the series' episode titles. Spoilers, obviously... but if you haven't come here for spoilers, you're in the wrong place.
Episode 101: “The Final Chapter”
Written for the Screen by Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong
Directed by Mike FlanaganEpisode 102: “The Two Danas”
Written for the Screen by Leah Fong, Julia Bicknell and Mike Flanagan
Directed by Mike FlanaganEpisode 103: “The Wicked Heart”
Written for the Screen by Elan Gale and Mike Flanagan
Directed by Michael FimognariEpisode 104: “Gimme a Kiss”
Written for the Screen by Jamie Flanagan and Mike Flanagan
Directed by Michael FimognariEpisode 105: “See You Later”
Written for the Screen by Julia Bicknell and Mike Flanagan
Directed by Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr.Episode 106: “Witch”
Written for the Screen by Chinaka Hodge and Mike Flanagan
Directed by Axelle CarolynEpisode 107: “Anya”
Written for the Screen by Jamie Flanagan
Directed by Axelle CarolynEpisode 108: “Road to Nowhere”
Written for the Screen by Julia Bicknell and Mike Flanagan
Directed by Viet NguyenEpisode 109: “The Eternal Enemy”
Written for the Screen by Elan Gale and Mike Flanagan
Directed by Viet NguyenEpisode 110: “Midnight”
Written for the Screen by Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong
Directed by Morgan Beggs (Source)
Here's a charming little bit from Tulsa World, where The Midnight Club's Heather Langenkamp talks about her role in the show, and her interactions with big fan Mike Flanagan:
“All horror, he loves,” Langenkamp said. “But he professed his love of ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ to me, so I had to be there and listen to it for half an hour, like how much he loved ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ and I’m like ‘OK, I get it.’”
It was his fanboy moment?
“He definitely is a fanboy in the most charming, delightful, sweet sense,” Langenkamp said. “I’ve met a lot of fanboys in my career, and what I love is seeing a fanboy find success because that’s what everyone dreams about is loving a certain thing as a child and loving a certain kind of movie and then actually getting to find a career in that.”
[...]
“I said, ‘well, go ahead and send the dialogue and let me look at it’,” she said of “The Midnight Club” opportunity. “And when I got it, it was a big part. I mean, the first scene he wanted me to do on tape was like a three-page monologue. I looked at my husband and went, ‘Holy cow, this is the lead in the show.’”
Langenkamp anchors the cast alongside eight “pretty amazing” young actors whose characters are fighting cancer.
“And then there’s me, the doctor, who is kind of seeing them through to the end of their lives and she has a hospice where her philosophy is that when you know you’re dying and you know you have terminal cancer and you only have six months or a year to live, why live in a hospital? Why live hooked up to machines? Why live going to the doctor every day when you could live another way, which is to have more agency with the choices that you make and the people that you see and the kind of life that you lead.” (Source)
More good stuff at the link!
It's almost heeeere! Check out the new trailer:
Vanity Fair really delivered the goods today with a "first look" at The Midnight Club TV adaptation, including an interview with Mike Flanagan, some comments from Pike, and a bunch of tasty tasty pics with commentary from the show's creator. Some choice tidbits:
[In college, late 1990s]... 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.
We already knew the TV series will use other Pike books as the stories told to each other by the lead characters. Now we know more.
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.
[...] Among the other Pike novels that will 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 (2011), in which a heartbroken young woman running away from her life picks up two eerie hitchhikers.
Flanagan also talks about first approaching Pike via a private message through Pike's official FB page, and Pike talks to Vanity Fair about his own supposed aversion to Hollywood.
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 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.
The article gives us more specifics, too, about the longer arc of the show's first season, and the goings-on at the hospice. Click through for a read, it's all good stuff.
Awesome news this morning. October 7! HOPE IT DON'T SUCK.
Over on the Tor books website, Alissa Burger has a column called Teen Horror Time Machine, which revisits YA horror fiction from back in the day. Her latest column looks at two snow-themed books: Slumber Party and Carol Ellis' The Window.
Beware spoilers, but the column is a good read.
In many ways, the pattern Pike establishes with Slumber Party, the first of the Point Horror novels, became the framework for much of the ‘90s teen horror that would follow, with themes of isolation, adolescent social drama, dark secrets that refuse to stay buried, and characters who aren’t exactly who they seem to be. (Source)
Netflix unveiled its genre slate for 2022, and among less illustrious company you'll find none other than...
... Yeah, The Midnight Club! I mean, it was already official but this just makes it more official, y'know? Amiright? WE WANT A TRAILER.
(Source)
ChristopherPikeBooks.com is an unofficial Christopher Pike fan page.
We aim to keep you updated on the latest goings-on in the Pike-verse!
