Horror and Metafiction in "The Midnight Club"
The opening scene metafictionally frames Mike Flanagan’s TV adaptation of Christopher Pike’s 90s YA novel, The Midnight Club. Ilonka, graduating from high school at the top of her class, is rehearsing a speech:
We are the authors of our own stories.
Sure, we can’t always control the plot, but we can decide who we want to be.
So to me, the next chapter just means the endless possibilities of the blank page.
New beginnings.
Ilonka is taking issue with the way clichés like “turn the page” and “the next chapter” push the idea that the future has already been written, that the future already exists and only need to be read on the next page. But what if we are authors rather than mere readers of our own life stories? What if “turning the page” is less about discovery of what’s next, and more about creating out of nothing, like a blank page?
The “blank page” becomes less of an exciting possibility a few minutes down the episode when Ilonka is given a painful, unexpected news. The next page is indeed blank, because she’s dying. Papillary thyroid carcinoma, or thyroid cancer. With lung metastasis. She’s terminal.
She’s no longer heading to Stanford for a literary degree. This, after gushing about romance and terror, Romantic and Victorian literature, how Frankenstein author Mary Shelley became the mother of modern horror at the age of nineteen — unwittingly anticipating her own teen authorship of the next chapter of her life, which had taken a morbid, horror turn.
After a year of ineffective medical treatment, Ilonka decides to get herself admitted at a faraway hospice where a former patient claimed to be supernaturally healed of thyroid cancer. Later, at Brightcliffe Hospice, the owner Dr. Stanton tells Ilonka that Julia Jaye, the former patient, was not discharged because she was healed (supernatural or otherwise). Julia Jaye’s was a simpler, less spectacular case of misdiagnosis. She just got lucky. Gesturing to the metafictional side of things, Stanton remarks how hard it can be to accept that a grand, fascinating story like Julia’s can turn out to be down to nothing more than luck.
In other words: Does a story have to be plausible in order to be believable? Should a (real life) story be discounted on account of luck, which in writing fiction is considered a lazy plot device the favorite of lesser writers?
Thus begins the mystery thriller part with Ilonka exploring the historied manor-hospice for young people awaiting their time, looking for clues about Julia Jaye’s healing as opposed to Stanton’s lackluster medical narrative.
The horror part, on the other hand, is considerably less fleshed out. The first “midnight club” meeting is instead dripping with metafictional commentary. The hospice kids, all terminal like Ilonka, were already dealing with the worst: they’re dying, what could be scarier than that? “We’re a tough fucking audience,” says Anya, the toughest character in the bunch. The kids had just mercilessly torn Natsuki’s story apart as a “barn burner” devolving into “a pile of bullshit jump scares.” The first Midnight Club story is a parody of bad horror storytelling.
Ghosts and/as Stories
So you guys sneak into the library every night and…
Make ghosts.
Tell stories.
“Make ghosts” sounds way better.
You tell a story, you’re giving birth to a new ghost because…
That’s all any of us are in the end.
Stories.
The actual ghosts in the story that make up the horror proper, jump scares and all — involving the creepy old woman with cataract eyes, the old man in the mirror, and the living shadow that stalks patients closest to dying — remain a mystery (perhaps reserved as material for Season 2 following a quick underdeveloped bit about the “Eater of Years”). What looks resolved with a rather neat closure is the mystery of Julia Jaye, with the narrative appearing to take the side of science and reason as represented by Dr. Stanton. The latter, however, is the subject of a big but incomplete reveal when shown in her private quarters taking off her wig. (Is she sick, too, like the hospice kids? Is she not who she presents herself to be?) Like Julia, Dr. Stanton has the Paragon hourglass tattoo too but on her nape (like the one on Paragon cult founder Regina Ballard), not on her arm like Julia.
If Shasta is Julia Jaye, and Dr. Stanton is (most likely) Athena, the estranged daughter of Regina Ballard, the mystery arc is playing them off each other. When Athena escaped from the cult (curiously, Dr. Stanton knew about a secret staircase to the basement; if she were Athena, this was how she could’ve escaped undetected), Regina replaced her daughter with Julia Jaye as successor, teaching her the ways of the cult that she wasn’t able to pass on to Athena. The Paragon was dissolved following the murderous ritual that Regina performed, but Julia eventually founded a similar commune in the woods adjacent to the property line of Brightcliffe. So Brightcliffe is on the one side governed by Dr. Stanton — medical and methodical, standing by principles of patient agency as the preferred way to face the horror of death; on the other side there’s Shasta/Julia and her naturopathic medicine and her attempts to con Ilonka and break into Brightcliffe.
With Shasta/Julia Jaye discredited at the end, and Sandra’s remission established as the case before the healing ritual was performed, the season ends on a demystifying note. What’s more, Anya is tragically unhealed in spite of her friends’ emotionally moving sacrificial act (it’s a beautiful and very enabling ritual, if I may add), and Spence’s intercom ghost story is rationally explained away by Sandra. Except for what we’re vaguely left with the stalking shadow (pursuing Amesh now after claiming Anya), and the old ghosts appearing only to Ilonka and Kevin and to no one else, the mystery-thriller part of the story is mostly down pat. The horror part though — involving ghosts, sickness, death — is comparably only very barely addressed.
Or is it?
If we view the horror in the story as connected to, first, Stanton’s prescription to drop out of the “fight” with disease, to give oneself the permission to live rather than die trying, and second, the teens’ nightly storytelling (which Stanton appears to secretly encourage by regularly replenishing the library firewood), the horror here begins to be less about horror story conventions and more about “making ghosts” (stories) and facing the ultimate horror — the void of death and dying alone/lonely. These teens, for various reasons, are going to die away from family who appear to be complicated to die with (if they were not already orphaned to begin with).
Sure, even the toughest of them all, Anya, screams in utter fear when the shadow shows itself to her. But in her weakest moment, she weeps to Ilonka saying that she wants to live, not that she’s afraid of dying. She’s had a tough life, but doesn’t want to let go yet. That’s the existential horror that’s scarier than shadows and ghosts.
Metafiction as Healing
It’s an ingenious plot structure to incorporate other Christopher Pike novels as the stories the Midnight Club members tell each other. (This is, in fact, closer to the origin story when Christopher Pike was approached by a fan who told him that she and fellow sick kids at a ward had been meeting nightly to discuss his books. The Midnight Club was written for the fan and her friends.) What’s more ingenious is how each tale, after Natsuki’s jump scare parody, serves to obliquely reveal each storyteller’s true character. It’s as though each storyteller, confronting death and consciously leaving behind “ghosts” that will become their stories, can only adequately express themselves indirectly through fiction, rather than directly through nonfiction. Natsuki herself, with only her beau Amesh as her audience to connect with rather than just entertain, in a very vulnerable moment chooses to tell a thinly-veiled fictional story about Teresa’s “road to nowhere” rather than confide about her debilitating depression and thoughts of suicide.
Kevin’s serialized story about a serial killer is structured to keep the literally dying audience alive: they must live another day if they wanted to hear the rest of the story. Dusty the teenage serial killer, Kevin’s avatar, is being controlled by a demon who passed down the line from his grandfather to his mother and then to him . It’s a slasher horror translation of his own real life struggle with being controlled by his mother whose damaging values were in all likelihood passed down to her by previous generations in the family.
At Ilonka’s turn to finish her own story, she breaks down when she reaches the part about healing a friend that Imani, her witch-healer heroine, had unintentionally hurt. The friend in the story to be healed is understood by everybody to be Anya’s fictional counterpart at that point when Anya is already dead, unhealed by the ritual that Ilonka had so passionately led the club to do. Symbolically, Cheri — who had never told a story at the club but who’s all outrageous “stories” about her real life — picks up where Ilonka stops talking to keep the story going, and finishes it. Cheri, who had never shared a “true” or revealing tale about herself, who’d remained a private person though shown to be keenly observant and sensitive (e.g., when she gifts Ilonka a designer wig and Amesh a Playstation), the only character who uses fiction to cover rather than reveal herself, is revealed anyway to be capable of linking herself to others and their stories while still deeply guarding her privacy. She isn’t the daughter of a movie star mother and a movie producer father for nothing (or so we’re told).
(I’m fascinated by Cheri, the character who best embodies metafiction in her overt use of fiction to encase herself. She deliberately “changes the story” about herself so it’s always obvious that she’s never going to tell the truth, or you’ll never know if or when she actually tells the truth. She’s actually the group’s prime storyteller 24/7, except during club nights when she only listens, never tells one herself until Ilonka appears to be needing help to finish hers. The only time she might’ve actually revealed some truth is during the ritual for Anya.)
And then there’s Anya before she slips to the other side, drifting in what feels like a waking nightmare wherein she’s healed but alone, because her friends who saved her with the ritual are already dead. In this alternate universe, she drags herself to daily manual labor that managed to crush her feisty personality, to talk therapy sessions with strangers, her days only mildly punctuated whenever she passes by a ballet school and she pathetically tries, with her prosthetic leg, to jump and dance. As the layers peel away and the dream-state is revealed for what it is, her friends show up one by one but as their fictional selves in the stories they told in the club — Amesh as Luke and Natsuki as Becky, Kevin as Dusty, etc., and finally herself as Dana. She isn’t alone after all, even in that nightmarish liminal space between life and death.
Through her bedside clock that’s like the intercom at Brightcliffe’s recovery room, she hears her friends’ (on the living side) talking to her, reading to her, telling her stories. They’re camped outside the room, taking turns talking to her through the intercom. Anya is unconscious and eventually succumbs, but what the friends don’t know is that she is being healed nonetheless — by the company of stories and her friends’ fictional selves interwoven with her own. If Anya were trapped in the darkness of her own fictions, her friends’ fictions turn up to help her heal. And she did.
Anya is the first in the group to “croak,” and is the one who promised to make a big fuss once she crosses to the other side. She promised to be loud as a ghost with the same bitch energy she brimmed with while alive. When she passed, her absence is loudly felt. She is a strong story made even stronger by the collective narrative of her friends.
(Anya may be trying to leave a major sign when her ballerina statue is found to be mended . Magically, it seems, like it was never broken.)
The stark horror of death — the unfinished plot line aside involving the old ghosts and the living shadow — is profoundly met in The Midnight Club by storytelling as the compulsion to authentically self-express before one vanishes to oblivion, or is banished to another space where the energy of life is reduced to a ghost. Storytelling is a way to nestle into company near the time of absolute solitariness (death). It’s a way to love and heal before we go.
The Midnight Club is less a horror flick, with just a bit of mystery thrown in to pull the plot along, and more a meditation on mortality and meaning as we author the blank pages instead of reading what’s already been written. We are individual books with blank pages, but the joy is when the authoring is shared, or when the pages merge or bleed into and stick to each other. Even the most fantastical or farfetched fictions can tell unspeakable truths about the teller that can’t otherwise be told.
Published on the same day as this Medium article.