Netflix Horror Series The Midnight Club Breaks World Record for Most Jump Scares

The Midnight Club has only been on Netflix for a few hours, but it's already broken a world record. 

Mike Flanagan, the macabre mind behind horror hits like The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, managed to cram 21 separate jump scares into the premiere episode of his latest Netflix series. This tally broke the Guinness World Record for "most scripted jump scares in a single television episode", and Flanagan was presented with the certificate for their achievement during the New York Comic Con panel for The Midnight Club on Thursday.

Flanagan, who admits that he "hates jump scares" and finds them "lazy", told reporters how this record-breaking number of jump scares came to be at a press conference before the panel. "The notes were already coming in of, 'time to do jump scares.' So I thought, we’re going to do all of them at once, and if we do it right, a jump scare will be rendered meaningless for the rest of the series and we’ll just destroy it and kill it, finally, until it’s dead," Flanagan said.

"But that didn’t happen. They were like, 'Great! More of those!'"," he continued. "So my whole career I’ve completely just shat on jump scares as a concept... now I have my name in the Guinness Book of World Records for jump scares, which means the next time I get the note I can say, 'As the current world record holder in jump scares, I can tell you I don’t think we need one here.' And that’s my whole strategy."

Based on the work of Christopher Pike, The Midnight Club tells the story of a group of terminally ill young adults in a hospice who meet at midnight to swap scary stories and make a promise to send a sign from the afterlife when they die.

The Midnight Club is now streaming on Netflix.

Jade Budowski is a freelance writer with a knack for ruining punchlines and harboring dad-aged celebrity crushes. She was previously a reporter/producer at Decider and is a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow her on Twitter: @jadebudowski.