The Haunting Of Hill House's Mike Flanagan is dusting off some old Christopher Pike paperbacks for Netflix
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For morbid, sheltered bookworms who had yet to discover Stephen King, there were basically two names: R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike. Both wrote digestible teen-friendly horror that indulged in cheap thrills, heavy petting, and satisfying twists. Stine’s obviously seen his star continue to shine throughout the 21st century—there’s Jack Black’s Goosebumps, of course, but also an upcoming Fear Street trilogy and a Point Horror series—but, as our readers are quick to point out whenever we share some Stine news, Pike’s not seen the same longevity, which is too bad when you consider how his stories downplayed Stine’s brand of soapy silliness for more mature themes and grislier, less forgiving deaths.
Well, that changes now, as Variety reports that The Haunting Of Hill House creator Mike Flanagan is currently developing Pike’s The Midnight Club as a Netflix TV series.
Flanagan confirmed the news on Twitter, writing, “I began brainstorming an adaptation of The Midnight Club as a teenager, so this is a dream come true. It’s an honor to introduce a new generation of young horror fans to the world of Christopher Pike.”
He also confirmed an aside in Variety’s story about how the series would incorporate other books by Pike. “We will be incorporating a lot of his books into the series,” he said in a follow-up tweet. “So whatever your favorite Pike book is, there’s a chance it’ll be part of the show.”
That might sound weird, this being a Midnight Club adaptation, but Pike’s 1994 book is a perfect vessel for anthology storytelling. Set in a hospice for terminally ill teenagers, it centers around a group of patients who regularly meet to share scary stories with each other, the likes of which operate as short stories within the larger narrative. The friends, knowing that they’re all marked for death, make a pact that the first one of them who dies will attempt to contact the others from beyond the grave.
The Doctor Sleep director is developing the series with Leah Fong, a veteran of Once Upon A Time and The Magicians who recently worked on Apple’s Amazing Stories reboot. She’ll have her hands full, too, as Flanagan is plenty busy himself. Not only is he premiering The Haunting of Bly Manor later this year, but he’s also in the process of shooting another Netflix horror series, Midnight Mass, though it’s been put on hold due to COVID-19.
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It’s nice that Pike found a second calling after his Starfleet career ended.
Well, hanging with the Talosians was fun for a while, but those big-foreheaded guys get tedious. So he decided to become an YA author. It’s not that hard considering all the dreck that gets published.
It inspired Mr Spock to write that famous child-rearing book.
It’s hard to write books, even teen-horror potboilers, via a binary beep system.
Yeah, but his editor should have got someone else to read the audio books.“One beep”“Two beeps”“Two beeps”“One beep”“One beep”
That is some sweet cover art.
Seriously, is there a gallery of Pike and Stine covers somewhere? I would lose an hour in such a place….
I want that Road to Nowhere cover in a frame.
There are a couple of great blog sites devoted to pulp paperback horror covers from the 70s and 80s, but I don’t know any that specialize in teen horror… There should be. I went to Pike’s website and they had the covers for some of his recent books. *Yawn*. I want the lurid originals back!
I got a Star Trek notification for this?
How’s Scott McGregor’s directing career going?
Hell yeah! Battered copies of Christopher Pike’s Spooky Sexy Teens™ books were all the rage at my elementary school’s library after the gateway drugs of Goosebumps and Fear Street, and I’m a big fan of Mike Flanagan’s work (Gerald’s Game was the better 2017 Stephen King film adaptation and no, I will not be taking questions at this time).I think The Last Vampire series taught me what HIV/AIDS was…
They must have been giving those books away because I remember entire racks of these in my middle/highschool library
I’m not sure I’d ever say that Pike was *less* soapy than Stine—the main thing I loved about Pike as a 12 year old was his soapy melodrama (my favourite show after all was All My Children). I actually remember very little about plot specifics, though partly because they’re all a blur. I was in french immersion and we had to read, and do a brief report, on one french book a week, along with a short write up—and at some point I realized our school library had, what seemed like, *racks* of Pike’s books in translation, so I went through at least ten or so that way… (It just occurred to me that I could have easily just found the English equivalent and read that and cheated… oh well.)
But this does please me, as someone who never read Stine, it seems about time 😛 (I remember them being out there, but for some reason I remained Pike-loyal, and I was a few years too old for the Goosebumps stuff when it really hit).
The Pike books were way better for teen reader me. i haven’t read them as an adult, so I won’t comment on the line-by-line quality of the actual writing, but Pike always went hard with some dark high concept premise that I had never encountered before (I mean, “Midnight Club” is set in a teenage hospice. Who else has the balls/questionable taste for that?).
Almost every regular Fear Street book, most of which I assume are ghost-written, is about a murderer, and it’s almost always the kid who had no motivation for doing it by Chapter Three.
Yep, that jives with my impression of Pike vs Stine. Pike seemed to genuinely really push the boundaries of what you could write about in these books (at least that was always the impression I got when reading them back then, which was a big part of the appeal).
First of all, reading Christopher Pike in French translation (or, crazier still, translating Christopher Pike into French) is a human experience I never imagined, and I’m so glad that it happened. He and Lois Duncan were my go-to horror writers as a tween. Duncan was the better writer but (not coincidentally) far less prolific. Some of her books were vaguely mature. Pike’s weren’t – they were hilariously trashy pulp, marketed to teens. Highlights include: Book that begins (literally first page) with the protagonist in a towel arguing with her boyfriend about sex and ends with the villain getting her brains blown out. Novel about a teenager using a camera to spy on the girls’ locker room and ends with the villains forcing him to snort poisoned cocaine (straight-up teen giallo, basically). Series of novels about a sexy vampire who seduces truckers. I have no idea how well any of this stuff (including RL Stine) reads for an adult. None of the prose is particularly good, and I’m guessing the plots feel even more recycled as your pop-culture knowledge expands. That said, there was a Fear Street novel titled something unwieldy like “99 Fear Street: The House of Evil: The First Horror” that broke my brain when I was a kid. It’s bog-standard haunted house stuff (pretty sure a lot of it is borrowed from the Amityville Horror), but it’s basically a story about a haunted house dismantling a family by killing most of the children and driving the parents crazy. It’s part of a trilogy, so there’s some redemptive shenanigans in the later installments. But as a stand-alone novel it was an incredibly bleak story for an 11-year-old. I could try to deny the impact all those trashy horror novels had on my developing psyche, but what’s the use?
Holy shit, the poisoned cocaine! Hadn’t thought of that in a minute. The ones that come to mind are Monster, which is awesomely gory, but also The Wicked Heart, which is a sad and nasty tale about a kid haunted/possessed/tormented into becoming a hammer murderer by his senile Nazi grandmother, I haven’t read it in years and suspect the book is not exactly sensitive in how it handles its Holocaust imagery but that’s some heavy shit to throw down on a 12-year-old.
Wow, I don’t remember either of those. I was a big fan of the trilogy where a girl gets murdered in a locked room at a party, and her friends spend the next two books trying to solve the mystery (and the series of other murders and attempted murders that spin off of it). But mostly it’s about a nerdy, confident boy and a popular, sensitive girl falling in love with each other, until they finally consummate their love on a graduation cruise and use up an entire box of condoms in one night (details like those are the real Christopher Pike touch). How much of myself did I see in that nerdy, confident teenager as a nerdy, shy tween? Embarrassingly much. Embarrassingly.
This should be interesting. Haunting of Hill House is maybe the most underrated and underappreciated show I’ve seen in this golden age of tv. It was fucking fantastic, but got no awards love or long-lasting recognition.
Off-topic, but serious question:What do people see in Flanagan? He appears to lack anything approaching a style, voice, or point-of-view.
I wouldn’t say that. You can disagree with the liberties he took with Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, but his Hill House and Doctor Sleep definitely have a unmistakable style, for what it’s worth.
As a director he has very good control over the pace and tone of individual scenes, and as a writer he makes an honest effort to write human characters. In both cases he leans very heavily on horror movie cliches, but he handles them with relative aplomb. The first few episodes of Haunting of Hill House had some very effective visuals and suspense sequences, and they set up a reasonably compelling family dynamic. Horror directors, maybe more than other directors, can get away with being stylists. All of that said, if Haunting of Hill House and Oculus are any indication, the guy doesn’t how to end a story. The Haunting of Hill House, in particular, was the rare TV show with an ending so bad that it made me dislike the rest of the series – the last episode tries to retcon the entire show, all to make suicide seem less bad (?). It was baffling.
I love Oculus and think the ending is great (if schematic, but that’s fine in a story about fate), but I’m with you on Hill House’s ending souring everything that came before. Based on Before I Wake and the Gerald’s Game adaptation, which I also liked until the ending, Flanagan has a King-ish sense of character and horror in the mundane but also problems wrapping stuff up (Hush was good though). The main concern with this is the hints at a Christopher Pike Universe, the referential stuff did not help Hill House and Flanagan is perfectly capable of a good simple horror flick without cramming in unrelated stuff just so viewers can get the reference.
I didn’t know he did Hush. That was tight. To my knowledge it’s the only movie with a “Chekhov super-loud deaf-person fire alarm,” and damn if that payoff wasn’t satisfying. I wonder if this will be a real anthology, with multiple writers and directors, or if he’s planning to do the whole thing. I could see him as a natural-born executive producer or something.Also, IIRC the novel the Midnight Club had a story where the protagonist shares all of her thoughts and sensations between two physical bodies, and there’s a scene where one version of is trying not to orgasm in front of her family because the other one is out getting fucked. That went right over my head when I was 12, but man were those novels weird motherfuckers.
Hahahahaha holy shit, that Midnight Club story sounds amazing. I’d be down with an actual anthology, what this seems like is a reference-fest like Castle Rock.Hush was a really good little survival horror flick in general, but the part where the guy removes his mask is incredibly chilling and a great shift in how the movie works. It’s not a boogeyman, it’s just some dude, and why keep up the charade? He’s got all the cards.
The ending of his Hill House was both terrible and basically required by the family drama genre he made the bad decision to write in. It’s incompatible with the bleaker story about an evil house he had carried over from the source material.
I guess that was what bugged me about it – up to a point the series was a bigger, louder take on a central theme of the novel: the characters kind of ruin things for themselves. The early episodes contrast these bright, happy kids with the miserable, broken adults they become, and it’s a pretty harrowing portrait of multigenerational mental illness – plus ghosts. Trying to shoehorn that story into a redemption arc means rejecting any honesty the show stumbled across in the first two acts. The whole thing feels hollow, and it really highlights how formulaic the whole thing is. Drawing a straight line from the sweet little kid in the haunted dumbwaiter to the terrified man with a heroin addiction is kind of bracing and simple. Ditto the idea of a young woman dying of suicide years after her mother died the same way. It gives all the jump scares a solid thematic grounding – literalizing the things that destroy families. But once you suggest that (to paraphrase the Simpsons) they’re much happier as ghosts, lalala la la, there’s nothing left to the narrative.
I think horror tends to work better in smaller formats, like short stories and segments of anthology film (or episodes of an anthology series). You can terrorize your protagonist, given them an unhappy ending or a narrow escape, and the audience can move on to the next story when they feel like it. In a longer format the audience has a different relationship with the characters. You wouldn’t spend twenty-two episodes of a the old standard season length only to conclude with your protagonist dying while regretting every choice they made. Your audience won’t accept that and will feel ripped off that they spent so much time only to receive that sort of payoff. This wasn’t as long as that, but it was still an instance of Netflix demanding More Content even if that’s wasn’t the best fit for the story.
I like his movies, if not his adaptation of “Hill House”. He’s a decent horror director who can do more than jump scares. I prefer Hush to Don’t Breathe as well as A Quiet Place.
Christopher Pike wrote novels while he was stuck in that beep chair after the radiation accident? Admiral Pike can do anything!
Am I the only one who clicked thinking it was going to be a Star Trek prequel?
Has somebody already written a series of books about Christopher Pike’s career? It seems like that would be an obvious thing to do and more interesting than just coming up with new adventures for Kirk or Picard.
Oh come on now, Robert April is where it’s at.
I definitely remember seeing at least a couple of Star Trek tie-in novels on the sci-fi shelves of bookstores with illustrations of Pike and early Spock in the turtleneck-shirted uniforms on the cover back in the 90s and aughts.
“Pike’s not seen the same longevity, which is too bad”.Still, he’s not one to carp about a less successful career. So he’s not the sole survivor of the teen horror writer wars? We all have our roe to hoe.
I had never even heard of Pike until an AV Club article a few years ago. I also recall that Roxanne Benjamin said she wanted “Body at Brighton Rock” to have a Pike feel, and after her segment of “XX” (easily the best in the anthology) that was a big disappointment. The ending particularly seems to belong to a different genre than the rest of the movie.