Watercooler Shows, the trending series that everyone talks about the next day at the office, around the water cooler. Watercooler Wednesdays seeks to be a (critical) guide through the VoD maze: from masterpiece series to guilty pleasures, and from blockbusters that keep you on the edge of your couch to hidden gems; if it leads to binging, then it’s exactly what we’re looking for.

Trick or Treat… Our pick of series for October is all about haunted houses. But how far I would go to recommend each of them is inversely proportional to the expectations I had. The treat is The Midnight Club, which, I admit, was on the “in case nothing else appears” list. I started watching it while waiting for The Watcher to come out, which turned out to be the trick. Both are genre films and have some well-known showrunners behind and, above all, both are produced by Netflix – so there shouldn’t really have been any surprises.

Mike Flanagan has a decent reputation in the horror for the big screen universe, but when it comes to the small screen, he’s the guy who makes haunted house series that always seem to star the same actors. After seeing The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, I was convinced that a story about some teenagers in a haunted hospice not only wouldn not have a lot to offer, but I could anticipate at every turn what I was about to be offered. Well, The Midnight Club is (unexpected) proof that practice makes perfect. For his third haunted house story, Flanagan gets the dosage just right (even if that means going easy on the haunted stuff).

Ryan Murphy, on the other hand, has rightfully earned his reputation as “the most powerful man” in modern television. The nickname arose after he signed a huge contract with Netflix, but the truth is that Murphy has been there all along; you might not know who he is, but you’ve surely seen a TV show created by him. Two of his more recent ones, Halston and The Andy Warhol Diaries, have already been tackled in our column, but it is also Murphy who created the anthology series American Horror Story. The trailer for The Watcher, with all the stars lined up beautifully to the music, is spot on and I had high expectations for it. But the later disappointment ultimately fits the narrative like a glove: a bona fide family is lured by an incredible real estate offer; there may be a white picket fence outside, but inside it’s full of secret tunnels… and it’s in one of these tunnels that I seem to have also lost my patience for a media product that wants to sell me something, but can’t decide what.

The Midnight Club (Mike Flanagan, Leah Fong, 2022)

There’s a reason I haven’t heard of Christopher Pike, the author whose novels have been adapted into The Midnight Club. It’s the same reason I would have overlooked the series if it hadn’t been for the horror packaging: the genre of the program, young adult. I don’t know how it is in literature (and if Pike is an exception), but TV shows aimed at this imaginary audience are probably a bigger wasteland of creativity even than superhero franchises. Of course, the combinations between the two genres are also the most lethal, but that seems to be the norm of YA productions in recent years anyway: the “youth” is always called to fix a broken (or downright dystopian) world by discovering their superpowers, magic and vampire romances; the general feeling is that a bright future lies ahead and that life belongs to them. And here is where The Midnight Club wins: no, you are not special, there is no bright future – in fact, there is no future at all, at most 6 months or a year.

“But I’m going to Stanford…” – the protagonist’s reaction to the news that she has cancer is, in retrospect, one of the best lines in the film. A sort of “I can’t, I have plans” that piles on layers upon layers of yet-to-be-discovered universal emotions, plus a bit of localized social commentary (speaking of the golden promises depicted in the YA literature): your chances of getting accepted to Stanford should be lower than a thyroid cancer at the age of 17.

The Midnight Club is a group of terminally ill teenagers, patients of the Brightcliffe Home hospice. Every night, the survivors gather in the library, by the fireplace, drink wine from the doctor’s hidden stash and tell each other horror stories, sci-fi, or neo-noirs (all written by the same Christopher Pike), in which they are cast as the main actors. It’s a way to cheat death, to live a life or several in the imagination, to find courage, to make peace and to seek forgiveness.

Ilonka, the heroine who won’t go to Stanford anymore, is the newest member of this club where membership is for life… and a bit afterwards. No one knows how the club started, every newcomer is initiated by those who are already there. Then again, it’s not as if the alumni are still alive to ask them for details. But that is precisely what is required of those who have passed: details from the beyond; the pact has always been that whoever dies first needs to find a way to give a sign to the others.

And there are enough signs: intercom whirring noises from the room specially set up for the dying, some ghosts that could very well be hallucinations from the various drugs, and a very real secret basement where it seems that the former owners (a religious cult) had indulged in human sacrifices. As I was saying, Ilonka is the one who pushes all these signs towards something logical, convinced that a former patient was miraculously cured and that everything has to do with this mysterious house.

Ilonka is the catalyst of the horror narrative, but that doesn’t mean that the other characters are just along for the ride, waiting for their violent end (it can’t be teen horror if at the end there’s not one person left alive, right?). In fact, the horror narrative is somewhat of a space-filler – and I say that with the utmost admiration for the horror mix performed here by Mike Flanagan. Be it a jumpscare, a frame story with serial criminals, a premonitory dream, a shadow in the mirror, etc., the horror here is skillfully covered, it’s like a musical theme, just long enough and right where it needs to play, so that you don’t realize you started watching a genre film and ended up seeing a full-on drama, a tearjerker with dying teenagers.

That’s not to say that the horror here is not fairly done or a diversion. On the contrary, the horror part is a necessary counterpoint to so much drama, and Flanagan also ticks off some meta-references to the specifics of the genre using the pretext of frame narrative: a ghost story is interrupted by a technical discussion about the nature of jump scares and whether they can really be classified as “terrifying” or are just instinctive reactions to an external stimulus. On the other hand, Flanagan’s previous haunted house series always had a melancholic touch, portraying those types of ghosts that are neither bad nor good, just tormented by who knows what tragic death, waiting for some kind of release/reconciliation with themselves. And The Midnight Club has plenty of that, even though it’s not ghosts, but living people, who have the same need to come to terms (beforehand) with a tragic death.

The Midnight Club is available on Netflix.

The Watcher (Ian Brennan, Ryan Murphy, 2022)

The most annoying thing about The Watcher is not so much the bad parts, but the puzzling and only seemingly random combination of bad and good parts. The Watcher illustrates very well a current trend in TV/streaming, a type of prefabricated art. The main difference from big screen hits or flops (the exact recipes followed by superhero movies, for example) is that some of these prefabs can be conceived and crafted to the highest artistic standard beyond their immediate function as a whole (it’s not technical mastery but art, i.e. that result that cannot be replicated by two professionals of the same rank). In the end, it depends on where you’re at with this half measure: do you see the glass half full, or the glass half empty? In this case, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was tricked, that the creators of this series didn’t even try to get something more out of (and beyond) the good ideas that came to them during the first brainstorming.

The Watcher revolves around an (apparently) wealthy New York family who moves into an (apparently) dream house in an (apparently) idyllic suburb. Nothing is what it seems, that’s pretty much the mechanism that feeds the plot, and at the center is the most coveted villa in the neighborhood where the Brannock family has just moved. Soon they begin to receive the threatening letters, wrapped in a real estate obsession that seems to date back at least a century: “the house wants fresh blood.” Everyone is on the suspect list, but most of all, the neighbors: from the retired couple dressed in matching tracksuits, who always imply things when talking, as if they were some old-fashioned mobsters from the Sopranos clan, to the two siblings across the street, founding members of an architectural preservation association, which the series borrows directly from American Gothic.

To the neighbors, it looks like the Brannocks have stolen a piece of the American dream that wasn’t designed for them, and now they’ve moved on to renovations: “look, of course, they brought a piano,” grumbles the matching couple from their colorful lounge chairs, annoyed not so much by the music but rather out of a racism rooted in interior design. The Watcher is based on true events – and that’s the hook that got me into this series and kept me hooked every time I wondered how such a disjointed script got past Netflix’s filters. The hook itself was the promise that in the narrative vaults Ryan Murphy was weaving a social satire – the bottom line, for which I didn’t need to get to the bottom, is that Murphy, a self-proclaimed baroque filmmaker, is simply playing with the filters and doesn’t take things further.

The best and the worst about The Watcher is shown gradually in the first 10 minutes. The series opens with a tracking shot through this impeccable neighborhood, carefree locals populate the green alleys, engaged in activities as if drawn from real estate ads: joggers, purebred dogs on a leash, tennis players in white with their rackets on their shoulders. Dean and Nora Brannock and their two children arrive at an open house in matching outfits – mother and son in white and gray, father and daughter in various shades of beige. You don’t have to read the interview with Ryan Murphy, where he says that a production assistant asked him for approval on the nail polish used by one of the characters, to understand that there is a deeper intention here. The scene also features a strange camera movement, insisting on furniture details, panning over the outlines of the house, it’s like an Instagram feed. Level one is obviously that semblance of fragile/fake paradise that must be built up in order to give the upcoming banish a certain dramatic tension. Level two would be that satire I was talking about, where the very idea of ​​domestic paradise, as made out to be in the real estate version of the American dream, is something reprehensible, or at least something worthy of ridicule. Ground zero for the satire would be the following: a family throws all their savings into a house they can’t afford or need (as we learn about the former owners it becomes clear that none of them could really afford it). In this sarcastic view, the real horror is the loss of status, although the hubris will be justified by all kinds of rationalizations.

Rationalizations like the ones in the following scene, in which Dean gives a keen speech to a banker friend who hesitates on giving him a loan: “I want my kids to have their own rooms. I want them to have a yard that’s big enough for them to play in. The schools are better. I’ll do whatever it takes to get this house.” The moment itself is well done but it doesn’t relate to anything so far, and that’s saying a lot because it’s only the second scene in the film and so different from the first one. It’s too much of a leap forward script-wise (Dean just seems possessed), and too much of a leap sideways in terms of style (from a realistic drama convention we ended up in a sort of comedy thickened with middle-class exponents who go berserk). It’s a confusion that increases as the details pile up erratically and such stylistically inconsistent scenes following one another become more and more frequent.

Leaving the art part a bit and entering the business area, the very format of only 7 episodes is baffling: series, in general, even the good ones, are always dragging out the story, that’s the pact with binging, and Netflix’s norm is usually 8, often even 10 episodes. And that’s exactly what The Watcher lacks, extra time for the details to settle. The script would still have holes, but by slowing down the pace you have more opportunities to creatively navigate the gaps. Starting with only a few suspects, the list keeps expanding: real estate agents, the police, a local teacher, a satanic cult, and including the new owners, everyone seems to have an interest in getting the house back up for sale. With his latest production, Ryan Murphy fishes in murky waters where he pulls out only red herrings – but each new investigative lead is abandoned almost as soon as it is announced. You hope in vain that an authorial hand will direct all these prefabs into something unitary and coherent, every character in this orchestra plays according to its own tune. They all shout one thing on the chorus, though – reminding of that never-fulfilled promise of satire: “Get the fuck off my property!”

The Watcher is available on Netflix.

Andrei Sendrea

Film critic and journalist, UNATC graduate. Andrei Sendrea wrote for LiterNet, Gândul, FILM and Film Menu, and worked as an editor on the "Ca-n Filme" TV Show. In his free time, he works on his collection of movie stills, which he organizes into idiosyncratic categories. At Films in Frame, he writes the Watercooler Wednesdays column - the monthly top of TV shows/series.