If you’ve begun watching The Midnight Club on Netflix, you may have noticed the tag “Part of the Flanaverse” affixed to the new series. Though the individual entries in said universe aren’t particularly interconnected, the sheer breadth of writer/director Mike Flanagan’s output for the streamer certainly justifies the “Flanaverse” moniker. The Midnight Club marks Flanagan’s fourth Netflix series, in addition to the four Flanagan-directed movies currently residing on the platform. Based on the young adult novel by Christopher Pike, Flanagan’s newest show follows a group of terminally ill teens at a remote cliffside hospice facility who meet in secret each […]

In Midnight Mass, the arrival of a new priest upends the small, isolated fishing community of Crockett Island. It’s an original idea from writer/director Mike Flanagan, who made his name in the horror genre adapting Shirley Jackson, Henry James and multiple Stephen King opuses. Flanagan has been excavating the bones of Midnight Mass for years and at various stages it morphed from novel to film to series. The characters’ inner demons and struggles with addiction and faith mirror his own, with details taken from Flanagan’s youth as an altar boy on New York’s Governors Island. With the personal nature of […]

With a list of credits that includes Annabelle, Hush and The Bye Bye Man, cinematographer James Kniest has spent a fair share of his career toiling in horror. “I somehow got into doing all these dark genre films and episodics, which I like a lot,” said Kniest, “but I often times say jokingly, ‘Can’t I just do a romantic comedy?’” The Haunting of Bly Manor fulfills half of that request. The second installment in Netflix’s Haunting Of anthology series, Bly Manor is a gothic romance that leans heavily into the latter. When the horror does arrive, it’s less jump scares and more […]