The Midnight Club Proves Anthologies Are Better When Each Story Has Meaning
The following contains mild spoilers for The Midnight Club.The Midnight Club keeps Mike Flanagan’s tradition of using horror to explore trauma and existential dread. Created by Flanagan and Leah Fong, the series deals with these complex subjects by giving voice to a group of terminal teenagers and young adults. While there’s a lot to unpack in The Midnight Club, the series deviates from Flanagan’s previous works by mixing the expected horror drama with an anthology format, in which each episode presents a brand new story to the audience. Contrary to most anthologies, though, every story of The Midnight Club is excellent. And that’s not only because each tale explores a different horror trope but mainly because each story has meaning. Since each individual story connects to the overall drama of The Midnight Club, the anthology format actually serves a greater purpose. For that reason, The Midnight Club argues in favor of meaningful anthologies by showing how a collection can only be as good as the parts it comprises.
Horror is keen on the anthology format, more than any other genre we dare say. However, anthologies can be discouraging, as we commit to a collection knowing all too well some chapters will be great while others not so much. Sometimes, the issue seems to be intrinsic to the anthology format itself, as different creative teams are given the screen time they need to explore a unique idea. And since everyone has their own idea of what makes a story good, the result is frequently unbalanced.
To make matters worse, more often than not, anthologies share only an overall theme, such as technological terror for Black Mirror and fantasy animation for Love, Death + Robots. While global themes can help trim down the audience, many different stories can fit the same topic, and we can never know exactly what we will find when watching an anthology. That’s why most anthologies have some chapters that stand up so much from the rest, while others fall to oblivion.
The issue is even more apparent in film anthologies, such as with the V/H/S franchise. A TV show allows us to skip an episode we didn’t like too much and immediately try a new one. A movie anthology, however, is a linear sequence of multiple stories we cannot skip except by manually fast-forwarding, which we can all agree is too much work to bother with. To counter this possible negative reception of the format, many movies and even some TV shows try to come up with an umbrella narrative, an overall story through which each individual chapter will be told. Even so, this umbrella narrative is often an afterthought, just a frame to hang pictures that are not connected to each other. The Midnight Club, however, proves the anthology format works better when the umbrella narrative is actually meaningful.
In The Midnight Club, a group of terminal patients gathers every night to tell each other horror stories while they wait for their death. All these people are dealing with their mortality and are aware the clock is working against them. Still, they try to celebrate their friendship by meeting and turning their pain into spooky stories. The result is that each tale does more than explore its subject. It also allows the viewer to understand better the individual challenges each of the patients faces every day. Stories like “Witch,” for example, reveal the conflict inside characters such as Ilonka (Iman Benson), who refuses to accept her friends will die regardless of what she tries to do about it. “The Eternal Enemy,” on the other hand, allows Spencer (Chris Sumpter) to come to terms with his sexuality. Finally, “Road to Nowhere” serves as a confession to Natsuki (Aya Furukawa) when she’s finally ready to talk about her failed suicide attempt. Stories don’t come from the void but our everyday experiences, and at each meeting of the Midnight Club, we can witness how different people process real-life events in their own way.
The Midnight Club is not precisely an anthology, as the series’ main storyline involves deadly cults, healing rituals, and creepy ghosts that haunt the hospice where most of the story occurs. Still, storytelling is at the heart of the show, with the tales of the club offering fun and thrilling breaks from the central mystery. More than a break from the umbrella narrative, each chapter of Flanagan’s quasi-anthology also brings something new to the table, as it moves character arcs forward and allows the members of the Midnight Club to grow while sharing their hopes and fears. That is a lesson anthologies everywhere need to learn if they want to be more than random collections of stories. Giving meaning to each chapter makes the whole story more interesting, and when the emotional stakes are higher, every wacky horror story hits harder than if it was presented as a self-contained tale.
The Midnight Club is available right now on Netflix.
Source link
