Mike Flanagan shares that he will be avoiding one of the pitfalls of his previous Netflix horror series Midnight Mass in The Midnight Club. Although Flanagan has made a name for himself as a theatrical horror filmmaker with projects like Oculus, Ouija: Origin of Evil, and the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, he is perhaps best known for his contributions to the creepy offerings on Netflix. His first partnership with the streaming platform was the 2016 home invasion thriller Hush, which he quickly followed up with the Stephen King adaptation Gerald's Game in 2017 and The Haunting of Hill House in 2018, a massively popular show that adapted Shirley Jackson's The Haunting. That show got a spiritual sequel in the Turn of the Screw adaptation The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Flanagan also had his hand in Netflix's buzzy 2021 series Midnight Mass, about a small town with a dark secret.Not one to mess with success, Flanagan has partnered with co-creator Leah Fong to bring the Christopher Pike young adult novel The Midnight Club to Netflix. The series, which is dropping season 1 on October 7, will follow a group of young folks with terminal illnesses who gather in the middle of the night to tell each other scary stories. The cast of young folks is mostly newcomers, but they are joined by Midnight Mass stars Zach Gilford and Samantha Sloyan, as well as A Nightmare on Elm Street's Heather Langenkamp.Related: The Midnight Club: Every Returning Cast Member From Mike Flanagan ShowsWhile speaking to Empire, Flanagan revealed how The Midnight Club will compare to Midnight Mass. Although the new series will have a much younger audience in mind, it will, if anything, be more committed to delivering the Flanagan-style scares. One common complaint about Midnight Mass was that the series had a tendency to feature characters delivering monologues for long amounts of time, and Flanagan reassures fans that, in addition to more focus on scares, "I wouldn’t subject a viewer of The Midnight Club to an eight-minute monologue." Read his full quote below:

One of the big things we assumed was that the younger viewers could handle scares. I wouldn’t subject a viewer of The Midnight Club to an eight-minute monologue.

Those who were impatient with the pacing of Midnight Mass will certainly be relieved by this development. It is somewhat ironic that this will be the case, considering that the entire series is literally about people telling stories to one another. However, considering the fact that this seems to be a setup for an anthology à la the '90s series Are You Afraid of the Dark?, it makes sense that the show will prioritize dramatizing the stories onscreen rather than holding close to the faces of the people telling them.

While Flanagan has presumed that viewers of The Midnight Club may not have the patience for long monologues, it certainly sounds like the series will be just as terrifying as his previous works. While both Midnight Mass and Bly Manor were more thoughtful horror projects with less focus on blood-curdling screams, he has certainly proved his chops at delivering jolts elsewhere. His assurance that the series will be a return to form means it might just be the scariest thing that Netflix drops this year. ​​​

UPDATE: 2022/09/01 23:03 EST BY RACHEL LABONTE

Mike Flanagan responds.

Flanagan later responded to the original headline of this article, which deemed the Midnight Mass complaint as "Major." His tweet prompted an additional response from Kohli, who played Sheriff Hassan on the Netflix miniseries. Both comments can be seen below; the original article appears above.

Source: Empire, Rahul Kohli