In a spooky new Netflix series from Mike Flanagan (creator of The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, among other horror offerings) and Leah Fong, a group of terminally ill teenagers try to scare each other silly with ghost stories. The Midnight Club, based on a novel by Christopher Pike, might make you jump with fear a record-breaking number of times—literally.
The first episode contains 21 jump scares, setting a Guinness World Record for the most scripted jump scares in a single TV episode.
GWR adjudicator Andy Glass presented the award to the show’s creators when the episode premiered at New York Comic Con earlier this month. It hadn’t been an unintentional record attempt: Flanagan had actively tried to stuff as many surprise scares into the inaugural chapter as possible—but not because he loves them. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.
“I just hate them,” he said at Comic Con, per a Netflix news release. “For most of my career, people have come to me while we’re working on scripts and said, ‘Add more jump scares.’ On this project, we thought we were just going to empty the missile silos, put as many jump scares as could ever fit into one scene so that hopefully by the end, they would be meaningless.” He’s hoping his newly acquired Guinness World Record can unofficially exempt him from including jump scares in the future.
His record-setting days might not be over, though. According to Guinness World Records, Flanagan “expressed interest” in setting a record for most on-screen deaths in a TV show—which would be a whole new GWR category.
If you appreciate a good jump scare a bit more than Flanagan does, these movies have the most.
Ellen Gutoskey
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