The Midnight Club Ending Explained: What Is Symbol Of The Hourglass? The Story Of Julia Jayne?

In Mike Flanagan’s TV series, The Midnight Club, the audience finds themselves in front of a hospice – Brightcliffe – for young people who have received a terminal diagnosis. So, the hospice serves them to share the experience of death and in some way to accompany them in the difficult but natural passage from the world of the living to the afterlife. At the center of The Midnight Club’s narrative are the boys and above all, there is their past which is intelligently told – as I anticipated in my review of The Midnight Club – by the anthological horror stories of the boys themselves.

The Midnight Club is based on the homonymous children’s novel by Christopher Pike, one of the most prolific authors of horror fiction for children. Although everyone can enjoy everything if what we are seeing is valid or, in any case, of our interest, it is obvious that in terms of language and structure, something will have to change if the reference work is a novel for children. Surely Goosebumps don’t expect to see Don’t Open That Door, to be clear. Similarly, for The Midnight Club, one should not expect a type of story like that of Hill House. Undoubtedly Flanagan, who co-wrote all the episodes and directed the first two, maintains the leaden and disturbing atmosphere as one would expect from a TV series of this type, but with a lighter narrative, with dynamics that do much more. leverages on some sentimental, adventurous, and curious situations typical of the adolescent world.

The Midnight Club: Summary

It was a dark and stormy night. Yes, the storyline of The Midnight Club might begin this way, but that’s not exactly how it goes. There will certainly be dark and stormy nights, but this is not the beginning. Actually: it was a night of joy and revelry before graduation and the prospect of a new and exciting life. At least, that’s what Ilonka (Iman Benson) hoped for herself. Fate, unfortunately, is cruel and mocking. And the 17-year-old is instead diagnosed with thyroid cancer that shatters all of her dreams. The first hopes that dominate, after a year of unsuccessful treatment are skepticism and, finally, surrender to a death sentence on his eighteenth birthday. Maybe she will be able to live another year or even two but not much longer. After all, we are at the beginning of the 90s and many treatments of today were still in the experimentation phase.

This puts Ilonka on the same path as a particular hospice, Brightcliffe Hospice, which welcomes only terminal adolescents, precisely to reserve a safe and secure environment for them to spend the last months of their lives. Doing some research on the long history of the place that over the decades has been reconverted differently and imaginatively, a place that for a short time even became the haunt of a strange sect, Ilonka discovers that a few decades earlier a girl like her with a terminal diagnosis managed to get out of there with the regressing tumor. Perhaps a coincidence, perhaps a miracle, yet this is enough for Ilonka as a hope to cling to tooth and nail.

To welcome her at the Brightcliffe there is a colorful group of young people, each with a handful of months of life ahead or a little more. Each with a different disease: bone cancer, uterine lymphoma, leukemia, aids. Each with their hope. Yet all united by a small and intriguing secret: a midnight club that meets every night, secretly with the director and nurses, in the hospice lounge, by the fire, to be able to tell thrilling stories. The purpose of the stories is not only to challenge the imagination but also to elaborate on one’s grief, pain and despair, through creepy and invented stories that, after all, speak of the same narrators of the story and those present at the table. But there is also something more existential and profound that binds the boys of the club, which is a promise.

The Midnight Club Ending Explained: Ilonka’s Goal

If the anthological stories of the boys of the Midnight Club have a narrative structure unrelated to each other, the story of Mike Flanagan inside the hospice instead connects episode after episode until the final revelation. In short: the story centers on the protagonist, the young Ilonka, who goes to Brightcliffe convinced that she can replicate an old satanic ritual to heal her incurable illness Di lei.

Ilonka’s research led her to discover that a girl her age and with the same terminal illness, Julia Jayne, was cured by Brightcliffe. During her secret research in Brightcliffe, Ilonka discovers that a sect called Paragon gathered in the basement of the hospice to receive treatment for their illnesses. But Ilonka didn’t find out the whole truth.

What is Paragon

Paragon is a community focused on exploring the healing power of nature. Later, studying Greek mythology, Regina Ballard also known as Acheso, brings together the cult of the 5 sisters, whose names are:

• Acheso
• Panacea
• Hygieia
• Iaso
• Aglea

The ritual requires the leader to be healed by the Greek gods and the energy they give off. The 5 participants in the rite must drink some sort of tea to balance their bodies, give something dear to them (by burning it) and pour their blood on the fire. A blood print must be placed on the forehead of those who need to be healed. The rite of the boys led by Ilonka, which is seen in episode 6, fails because the real rite requires that all the sisters but one die. This Ilonka doesn’t know, but he finds out later in The Midnight Club series.

The Symbol Of The Hourglass

The hourglass for the ancient Greeks represented the earth on one side and the air on the other, synonymous with the balance of the world. The hourglass also marks the passage of time. The fact that the hourglass can be turned upside down marks the fact that time can be infinite. This only happens if the hourglass is turned. As Julia Jayne argues in Episode 6, the hourglass was borrowed as a symbol from Paragon but is a much older symbol. Paragon’s ritual, according to Regina Ballard, could force nature by turning the hourglass and making its members virtually immortal.

The Story Of Julia Jayne

Episode 10 of The Midnight Club opens with a flashback dated 1968, which explains a lot about Julia Jayne’s idea and why it conflicts with Brightcliffe’s director Dr. Georgina Stanton. Julia Jayne was a very sick girl, like other Brightcliffe patients she had a few years or months left to live. Like Ilonka, Julia inquired about how she could continue to live and so she discovered the existence of Paragon and the theories of the leader of the sect Regina Ballard called Acheso, the Greek goddess of the healing process. The fact that Regina Ballard is still alive proves to Julia that the healing rite worked.

Regina Ballard thus becomes Julia Jayne’s teacher. The two stayed together for a week in 1968. The period in which Julia learns Acheso’s methods and then decides to try to heal by joining Brightcliffe. Inside the hospice, Julia puts into practice the teachings of Regina Ballard and founded the Midnight Club on January 5, 1969. From this moment on, Julia begins to write a diary that, beware, is different from the one written by her daughter. Regina Ballard or Athena. Julia Jayne’s cancer returns years later. So, she conspires by cheating on Ilonka to get her to do the ritual. But Julia is not going to heal Ilonka but herself. So Ilonka is destined to die as well as the other sisters present. But the director Stanton stops everything and Julia runs away.

Who is Director Georgina Stanton?

The story of Regina Ballard suggests that the rite that gave her life killed all of her “sisters”. The Midnight Club story also suggests that Regina aka Acheso discovered that the ritual would only work with the human sacrifice of the 4 sisters. So, Regina voluntarily killed the other girls. Regina has a daughter named Athena, who at the time of the ritual went against her mother’s ideas. However, Athena followed Paragon’s ideas but in a different version from her mother. There is no mention of murders following the Regina Ballard rite.

According to the tenth episode, Regina lived in Brightcliffe but was turned away as mentally ill after the murders. Her daughter Athena accused her of the murders and inherited the Brightcliffe facility, turning it into a hospice for terminally ill young people. In the final scene of The Midnight Club, Brightcliffe director Georgina Stanton takes off a wig denoting the fact that she may be sick with cancer or that she was. On her neck, he has tattooed the symbol of the hourglass, the same as that of Paragon. It seems clear that Georgina Stanton is Athena, the daughter of Regina Ballard. Also, for this reason, she seems to be particularly opposed to the presence of Julia Jayne, the disciple of her mother.