After “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” Mike Flanagan took a break from hauntings to write and direct the horror miniseries “Midnight Mass,” a show that has more in common with “The Midnight Club” than just having the word “midnight” in the title. 

Like the “Midnight Club” characters, who are facing death at a cruelly young age, “Midnight Mass” also explored death and how we deal with our fear of it. In one of the series’ most heart-wrenching scenes, a character who knows their own death is imminent delivers an eight-minute monologue on what they believe will happen to them when they die. Instead of describing a traditional afterlife, they express the beauty of death from the viewpoint of an atheist:

“My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me. No pain, no memory, no awareness that I ever was … I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.”

In “The Midnight Club,” the group of kids makes a pact that whichever one of them dies first will try to contact the others from the other side, so brace yourself for more of the tear-jerking material that Flanagan does so well. But as moving as the speech in “Midnight Mass” was, Flanagan is aware that younger audiences might not have the patience for lots of long soliloquies — and therein lies the difference between his two “Midnight” shows: 

“I wouldn’t subject a viewer of ‘The Midnight Club’ to an eight-minute monologue.”

“The Midnight Club” releases October 7, 2022, on Netflix.