Are There Hidden Ghosts in Netflix's 'The Midnight Club'? Here's What's Lurking in the Background

May 2024 · 5 minute read

Mike Flanagan is understood for placing discrete Easter eggs in his collection. Given its paranormal premise, are there hidden ghosts in 'The Midnight Club'?

Source: Netflix

Having helmed fantastic projects like 2016's Ouija 2: Origin of Evil, 2017's Gerald's Game, and Netflix sequence The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan is on every horror fan's radar. His newest enterprise — the Netflix series The Midnight Club, which is in keeping with the 1994 novel by way of Christopher Pike — has been a passion project of Mike's ever since he was finding out to get his BA in digital media and picture at Towson University.

Two many years later, horror king Mike Flanagan introduced The Midnight Club to lifestyles, with Christopher Pike's blessing, in fact.

"Seeking respite at a teen hospice shrouded in mystery, a terminally ill young cancer patient is determined to reverse her fate — no matter the cost," the legit synopsis for The Midnight Club reads. At Brightcliffe Hospice, the resident teens unite at midnight each night time to inform each and every different spooky, bone-chilling stories. Not most effective that, but they make a dismal pact pointing out that the first member to kick the bucket must ship a sign from the realm of the useless.

With a respectable Rotten Tomatoes ranking of 85 percent, Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong's The Midnight Club is jam-packed with raw emotion, heartbreaking metaphors, and record-breaking jump scares. In Flanagan type, The Midnight Club additionally boasts some eerie blink-and-you'll-miss-them background moments. That's proper, TMC harbors some hid Easter eggs, and Mike wants you in finding them.

Source: Netflix

'The Midnight Club' is brimming with Easter eggs plucked from Mike Flanagan's earlier tasks.

The rapidly expanding Mike Flanagan universe is more interconnected than we realized.

“There are some cameos in the show that are truly fun and actually arduous to find,” Mike told TV Insider throughout a press breakfast at Netflix's NYC location. "But if you keep your eyes peeled or your ears peeled, you can find Hamish Linklater, Carla Gugino, and Kate Siegel in the show.”

While Hamish Linklater wowed as Father Paul Hill in Midnight Mass, Carla Gugino has worked on several Mike Flanagan projects, such as The Haunting of Hill House, Gerald's Game, and Midnight Mass. Mike's wife, Kate Siegel, has acted in nearly all of his projects, including his upcoming miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher. (Despite its not yet being released, Mike shared that there are even nods to The Fall of the House of Usher in TMC.)

If you're looking for their faces, we'll just stop you there. As reported by Elite Daily, the trio of actors lent their voices to characters on Order and Reprimand, "the pun-filled Law and Order parody that Anya watches in her ghostly realm."

Would we consider them to be hidden ghosts? Not exactly. Their cameos more so act as camouflaged winks to hardcore Mike Flanagan fans.

The Midnight Club does feature a haunting pair of elderly spirits that roam Brightcliffe Hospice, but they're by no means hidden from the audience. In The Haunting of Hill House, however, there are over 30 ghosts creeping and lurking in the background, begging to be discerned by dedicated viewers.

Another discrete Easter egg to hunt down in The Midnight Club is the Lasser Glass — aka the supernatural mirror from 2013's Oculus.

“It wasn’t quite in the right place to leap out at you, but it’s visible,” Mike relayed. “You can see it there … But yeah, if you can find Hamish, I think that’s a real Easter hunt victory there.”

Upon close examination, you can spot the demonic antique mirror resting against the wall in Brightcliffe’s basement in Episode 6, titled "Witch."

According to the show's executive producer and one of Mike's frequent collaborators, Trevor Macy, the mirror has emerged "in everything since" its debut in Oculus. It's true, the Lasser Glass can be found in The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Gerald’s Game, and Doctor Sleep. That dusty old thing gets around!

THE LASSER GLASS finally spotted in THE MIDNIGHT CLUB (Episode 6 "Witch"). pic.twitter.com/C6TQl6DYHk

— Mike Flanagan Source #TheMidnightClub (@flanagansource) October 10, 2022

Though we may not consider them to be Easter eggs in the traditional sense, several of Christopher Pike's novels are alluded to in TMC. In fact, that was a large portion of Mike Flanagan's lengthy pitch to the highly skeptical author.

"I don't think he’d noticed anything that I'd completed at that point, but we got on the phone for like three hours and he agreed to let me take a shot with the display. The pitch was, we will do The Midnight Club, but the tales the children tell are other Pike books, and he really preferred that concept," Mike defined at a press match, according to Inverse.

"Kevin’s tale is tailored from 1993’s The Wicked Heart, Sandra’s is 1988’s Gimme a Kiss, Amesh’s is 1990’s See You Later, Ilonka’s is 1990’s Witch, Natsuki’s is 1993’s Road to Nowhere, and Spence’s is 1993’s The Eternal Enemy," Elite Daily detailed.

Anya’s story is the only one that comes directly from the pages of the Midnight Club novel.

The Midnight Club set a new Guinness World Record for most jump scares in a single TV episode and this scene is a big reason why.

You've been warned. pic.twitter.com/FLUSehb9bQ

— Netflix (@netflix) October 8, 2022

Whether it be a word, a prop, or a voice, Mike Flanagan has subtly stamped his legacy in every single place 2022's The Midnight Club.

Season 1 of The Midnight Club is these days streaming on Netflix.

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