'The Midnight Club' Just Broke the Guinness World Record for Most Jump Scares

the midnight club
'The Midnight Club' Breaks Record for Jump ScaresNetflix

Following on from the critically acclaimed The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and last year's Midnight Mass, horror auteur Mike Flanagan has just released his latest horror series with Netflix: The Midnight Club. Adapted from Christopher Pike's young adult novel and filled with allusions to his wider body of work, The Midnight Club takes place at a hospice for young people who are terminally ill, where each night the residents gather to tell scary stories by the fire.

The story-within-a-story format will be familiar to anyone who watched Bly Manor, a Henry James adaptation which drew on traditional genre conventions associated with the English ghost story and subverted the, and the creaky old house setting is a Flanagan staple at this point. And both of these conceits are used to great effect to deliver a series of massive jump scares.

In fact, the season premiere, entitled "The Final Chapter," has just been awarded a Guinness World Record for the most scripted jump scares in a single episode of television, with a startling 21 "boo!" moments.

A large number of those scares come in the inaugural story told by Natsuki (Aya Furukawa), in which a ghost keeps appearing suddenly in frame, screaming. Natsuki's over-reliance on jump scares in her story draws criticism from some fellow members of the Midnight Club, a sentiment echoed by showrunner Mike Flanagan, who acknowledges that they "can be very, very lazy"—but that when deployed correctly, can be hugely impactful.

"Generally speaking I have a love/hate relationship with jump scares, and that's mostly hate," he said while filming the historic first episode. "Some of the most fun I ever had growing up in the genre and watching horror films was when a really terrific jump scare would land... I think if you can get somebody once, if you can get somebody twice, that's pretty impressive. I'm hoping we can get somebody 17 times. It's going to be like machine gun fire."

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