The Midnight Club jumpscares

The first episode of The Midnight Club has so many jumpscares it’s broken a world record

I’m still having heart palpitations


Mike Flanagan has finally dropped his now annual spooky Autumn feast for us on Netflix, and this year it’s the turn of The Midnight Club – an adaptation of the Christopher Pike book of the same name. And whilst we’re always getting spooked and unsettled by whatever Flanagan shoves down our spooky gobs in October, it’s The Midnight Club that has ended up breaking the Guinness World Record for most jumpscares in a single episode of television.

Mike Flanagan actually hates jumpscares

The ironic thing about it all is that Mike Flanagan famously hates jumpscares – a horror technique where the director / writer uses a sudden brief shock to scare audiences rather than building menace and dread in other ways. They’re famously overdone in horror – and Mike Flanagan has spoken a lot about trying to avoid them in his work.

The first episode of The Midnight Club features a lot of jumpscares, but they’re mostly done as a bit of a joke. The crux of them come during the first story we hear the club tell each other, and the rapid amount of jumpscares get chastised by the rest of the group as the storyteller details her spooks.

Speaking about his new world record achievement, Mike Flanagan told Deadline: “My whole career I completely shit on jump scares as a concept, and I wanted to make sure it was pinned to me, too, as much as it is to the show, to Netflix, and all of us who have inflicted this on everyone.

“Now, I have my name in the Guinness Book of World Records for jump scares, which means next time I get the note, I can say, ‘You know, as the current world record holder for jump scares, I don’t think we need one here.’”

The Midnight Club is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook.

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