How ‘The Midnight Club’ Cinematographer Made the Netflix YA Series Spooky
In cinematographer James Kniest’s eyes, psychology is the hidden element that makes a show like “The Midnight Club” spooky, along with other more obvious ingredients like a haunted hospice house, spiritual and religious symbols, the occult and, of course, the classic jump scare.
“To make things scary, a lot of it is not showing everything and letting things fall off into darkness with maybe areas that you don’t know what might or might not be there,” cinematographer James Kniest told TheWrap in a recent interview.
“I also think that lighting plays a huge role in that. And then sometimes like quick camera moves that reveal something or even orchestrating some blocking where you might see something barely move in the background or maybe even really close in the foreground. Hinting at things but not showing all of them so that people’s minds do a lot of the work for you and a lot of the heavy lifting, because we all have our own visions off what’s scary so if you give just a couple of hints that people would interpret in their own way, [they] can scare themselves. It’s just leaving it up to your own imagination.”
Showrunner Mike Flanagan’s latest frightening Netflix series, adapted from Christopher Pike’s 1994 novel, targets a young adult audience in its first season of ten episodes. Kniest shot Episodes 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7, setting the tone right from the start with a classic misdirect.
“You think something bad has happened, and I think it works, and it was kind of fun, and that’s why it’s not necessarily scary and also it’s what your mind does with it,” he said of the show’s opening scene. “It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s something red going down the drain.’ We automatically think it’s blood. But then we pull back to reveal, ’No, gotcha it’s hair dye.’”
Main character Ilonka (Iman Benson) has so much ahead of her, college at Stanford and a love of literature in tow, and she dyes her hair red to celebrate high school graduation, but thyroid cancer cancels all of her plans, sending her to Brightcliffe Manor for hospice care up the coast from her Sacramento hometown.
“Brightcliffe Manor itself has a very cavernous interior, so even [when] it’s daytime, it’s still kind of mysterious in a way. A lot of the daytime stuff, for the most part, happens in the A story which isn’t necessarily the time where the audience is trying to be scared,” Kniest said. “It’s more about the relationships that the characters are having and some of the storylines and story plots of what they’re going through is happening during the day.”
Each resident of Brightcliffe waits out their hospice days with a terminal illness, bonding in their dreary setting. On her first night there, Ilonka follows her roommate Anya (Ruth Codd) to a secret basement meeting between all the patients, who meet nightly in The Midnight Club to tell stories and try to scare each other (since the fact that they face early deaths toughen their shock factor).
“Each episode has at least two different stories going on in it — some of the episodes, there’s sub stories inside a sub story,” Kniest said. “So there’s lots of room for our interpretation and for creativity to make things look and feel different, have different textures and tone. So there’s a ton of variety, which I think is important for that audience as well because they like to have a variety of stimuli.”
The A story involves the current residents interacting at Brightcliffe, and the B story involves small tales told at the nightly meeting of The Midnight Club. Each episode ends with a scary story shared by one of the members of the club (aka the Brightcliffe residents), with characters played by the same actors who portray the A-line ensemble.
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“They meet every night at midnight in front of the fire in the library to try to one up each other with their storytelling and to come up with the most creative stories and really try to get each other and those are the B stories,” Kniest said. “And those B stories are motivated by what these young people might have seen or what their references are in terms of movies throughout the 80s and 90s and books and art and that kind of thing that would inform their storytelling in general.”
Within the primary story, a historical timeline presents itself regarding the background of Brightcliff as Ilonka explores the grounds.
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The setting of Brightcliffe also allowed Kniest to work with production designer Laurin Kelsey to insert windows in certain parts of the structure for light sources. The many hallways and corridors also provided unique challenges to choreographing and staging.
“The interior of Brightcliffe — it’s a lot of hallways, which I think when it all came together, it was pretty surprising,” he said. “So we had to come up with a way of like, ‘How are we going to light these for the A stories and for the B stories and then through different periods. All that was shot on stage. We didn’t have a real hospice, we built a small facade up on a cliff, and the rest is all CG and so the interior was built on stage from scratch.”
Flanagan put 21 jump scares into the first episode alone, which broke a Guinness World Record.
“Jump scares are a traditional genre mechanism to elicit a reaction from the audience. I know that Mike Flanagan is famous for saying that he doesn’t care for them. He thinks that they can be potentially kind of cheap,” Kniest said. “But I know a lot of the fans for the genre like that. It’s like a roller coaster. They know what’s going to happen, they know the drop’s coming, but they still want it and enjoy it. So I think it’s something that’s just slightly expected. So in doing that, it’s a lot of it is the choreography and the setting, setting up of the camera move in concert with the actors movement. And then it all happens in the edit so you can cut where you want it.”
Kniest also recognizes the difference between all of Flanagan’s works, particularly in terms of the age group of “The Midnight Club” audience.
“It’s definitely tamed down from what traditional horror genre stuff would be with really graphic or disturbing images. A lot of the stuff is more psychological in the show and it’s more about what the the young people are going through and then the stories they tell,” he said. “I know people have been a little bit surprised by the target audience for this show. And some of the material hasn’t been maybe as deep or as cerebral as some of [Flanagan’s] other work, but I think that he was a huge fan of the Christopher Pike books and a lot of people were, so it’s really cool to see it all come to life in such variety, to try to pare it all down into something that’s a Netflix season.”
“The Midnight Club” is now streaming on Netflix.
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