‘The Midnight Club’ review: A teen horror — with heart

nypost.com:

“Bly Manor,” “Midnight Mass” and now “The Midnight Club.”Based on novels by YA horror author Christopher Pike (also an executive producer), “The Midnight Club” is set in 1990s California and follows college-bound students.Ilonka (Iman Benson) is a star student who gets a terminal-cancer diagnosis right when it feels like her whole life is ahead of her.

After finding Brightcliffe online, she gets her foster dad Tim — Matt Biedel, who looks like he gets the call when David Harbour is busy — to agree to take her to the mysterious hospice for a “trial run,” like “cancer sleepaway camp,” she says.

It’s run by Mark (Zach Gilford) and Dr. Stanton (Heather Langekamp, “The Nightmare on Elm Street”) and is filled with other ill young patients who gather around the fireplace late at night to share wine and exchange scary stories — while pondering their own frightening proximity to the grim reaper. (The hospice is, naturally, a rambling old Victorian mansion, naturally).

Ilonka is surrounded by colorful characters, but none of them are defined by their diseases. For instance, there’s Kevin (Igby Rigney), who tells a story about a serial killer; Anya (Ruth Codd), Ilonka’s prickly roommate; and Amesh (Sauriyan Sapkota), who wishes the hospice had “hazing” like a college fraternity.Brightcliffe has a sordid past and it’s full of its own enigmatic goings-on: it’s not unusual for ghostly figures to be glimpsed in the halls, and there’s a cult that believes it resides on an ancient healing site.The 10-episode series alternates between Ilonka exploring these mysteries and making discoveries about the hospice, and her friends’ tall tales playing out onscreen as stories within the larger story.