Mike Flanagan has, of overdue, outstanding himself as one of Netflix’s signature creators and as a generational parent inside the horror style; though his past series for the streamer, which includes “Midnight Mass” and “The Haunting of Hill House,” had been of numerous high-quality normal and from episode to episode, they’re constantly exciting. His willingness to interact thoughts with his scares units him apart, possibly extra than it have to.

So it’s miles with “The Midnight Club,” which Flanagan and Leah Fong co-created based totally on the paintings of YA novelist Christopher Pike. Here, Iman Benson performs Ilonka, a college-certain excessive school salutatorian who gets a analysis of terminal cancer. Ilonka is both a celebrity student and an idealist; she researches Brightcliffe, a facility to which her foster father can take her to be positioned into hospice, and holds in reserve a mystery wish that there will, there, be a miracle remedy for her. What she finds, first, is a circle of unwell young adults who accumulate while the clock moves twelve to proportion frightening stories; it’s a mordant nihilism they percentage, and a experience of indulgent pride inside the expertise that things may be worse: They could be combating towards cosmic forces of evil.That strains start to blur, with jump-scares making the hospice appear to be a portal to more than simply youngster creativeness, need to come as no wonder. But say this lots: The tales are properly-informed, conjuring a actual feel of dread that each exists external to these younger human beings’s plights and, inevitably, nestled up alongside them. Ilonka’s aggregate of willfully blind wish and authentic fear is a tough element to seize, however Benson excels; other standouts within the forged encompass Ruth Codd as an Irish immigrant with a prickly outside covering over vulnerabilities and Chris Sumpter as an HIV-high-quality youngster pressured to confront his mother and father.

The mix of personal testimonies many of the young adults has the energy to resonate with anyone, but one suspects this display will find its most attentive audience among high-schoolers with stiff constitutions and robust nerves. Even more than “Stranger Things,” it operates with a sort of teenage emotional logic, with characters and the show itself thrumming with the passion to talk out and be understood on their personal phrases. (And, extra so than on “Stranger Things,” adults are a glancing and coffee presence, with Heather Langenkamp and Zach Gilford gambling, respectively, the founding health practitioner and the nurse practitioner of the hospice.)

But even this grownup famous “The Midnight Club” as a pretty complete example of the first-class of Flanagan’s technique at some stage in his Netflix work — using horror as a way to probe the worst matters that might show up to somebody, arriving at a place of interest and compassion approximately grief and loss. That, right here, the grief and loss is for the characters’ own futures needs a delicacy that Flanagan and Fong own; it also demands to be matched by means of a horror correctly outsized and horrifying, and that they supply that, too.