Netflix isn’t sitting idly by during the streaming wars as they’re currently taking on yet another idea from an older novel known as The Midnight Club. Clandestine and slightly cliched as it might sound, the story is mostly about a group of terminally ill teenagers that sit around and tell ghost stories, much as Kevin Fraser of Joblo relays. But the pact they make, that whoever dies first contacts them from beyond the grave, could lend itself to a kind of creepy feel that might win people over. But given that Netflix and many other streaming sites are being looked to as a big source of entertainment at the moment it’s not hard to think that someone is going to pick up on this and start talking about it eventually. The story is one that a lot of people might have read when they were younger and forgotten about by now since it did come out in the 90s, but the chances are still pretty good that a lot of people could possibly remember the story and even get a grin out of the idea that it would be made into a series that they might enjoy over 20 years later. It’s hard to say right now just when it might come to fruition and whether or not it’s going to be oriented to follow the book entirely, but bringing back something from the past is a common practice right now that a lot of people are finding endearing and even entertaining so it’s not difficult to think that it’s going to keep happening as long as people are willing to watch.
A group of teens sitting around telling ghost stories almost feels a bit juvenile at this time, but from a certain perspective it could be because the world we knew back in the 90s has changed in so many ways that the imagined stories that kids used to tell around campfires no longer hold a candle to the real stories that wait when the lights are back on. That’s a rather dim way to look at things but it’s the unfortunate truth as horror and even mildly scary stories have lost a lot of their effect on people throughout the years for one reason or another. Even those scary stories that are meant solely for entertainment and not shock value tend to come off a little flat now and again since they don’t often appeal to anyone but those that are either scared easily or don’t have the life experience to know a tall tale when they hear one, meaning young kids that are still of the mind that there are scary things that roam in the night. Plus, when one sits down to think about it, a group of terminally ill teens making a pact to haunt each other after death is a little morbid, not to mention that it could be fodder for a horror movie of such proportions that it would return the shock and awe that people are looking for. Dayna Mortimore of Ozzie Collectables had something to say about horror in pop culture.
This isn’t the only Christopher Pike story that will be set into development though as the man with the plan behind this endeavor, Mike Flanagan, has an idea to start incorporating other Pike novels into Netflix’s schedule and make a series of them that will serve to entertain viewers in the unique way that these books likely entertained a lot of readers back in the day. It might be a nice change of pace for those that want to watch something that’s a little more grounded and not quite as serious and it could be a series that we’ll be talking more about in the days to come. When it will get under way and how long it will be until we finally see the finished product is hard to say, since at this time the shutdown is still holding strong and there’s no real way to tell just how much longer it will be until people can go back to work. Right now Hollywood is in a kind of stranglehold that hasn’t really locked in a death grip but is currently keeping a lot of great ideas from being pushed forward into production as they languish in development. That could be a good thing at the moment since it will give plenty of people a chance to better refine and rework whatever they feel needs a little more attention. In turn such time can be used to sharpen dialogue, polish up a few things here and there, and get ready for the moment when it will be allowable to get back into the studio and start cranking out one TV show after another and one movie right on the heels of the one before it. It’ll happen, but until then a lot of people are starting get antsy. Stacy Perman of the Los Angeles Times would probably agree.
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