The Midnight Club Easter Eggs and what they mean for season 2

The dirty bed in the basement, the forest paintings on the walls, mysterious photographs in the hallway and, of course, the two old people haunting the corridors…there are plenty of plot points left unexplained with the conclusion of Mike Flanagan’s latest jump-scare series. But Netflix‘s The Midnight Club Easter eggs, though extremely subtle, could tease a season 2 and the horrors to come.

Flanagan, fittingly from Salem, Massachusetts, has made a name for himself in the last few years, word of his disturbing ingenuity really kicking off with the 2018 release of his award-winning series, The Haunting of Hill House. Stephen King, who has reined on the throne of terror for decades, went so far as to call Hill House “close to a work of genius, really.”

The real magic of Hill House, as well as Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass, is that the series isn’t made up of one clear storyline. There are a few threads, at first appearing separate but revealing themselves later to be part of a complex, interwoven story with details so finely tuned to each other that a viewer can’t help but wonder whether or not there’s any chance these stories are actually real.

The Midnight Club is no exception. The story begins with a bright and brilliant high school graduate named Ilonka, bound for greatness, until she gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. A series of dark apparitions and unsettling dreams leads Ilonka to Brightcliffe, a hospice home for terminally ill young adults.

The home is run by a genuinely kind but sometimes illusive Dr. Georgina Stanton who gives Ilonka and the other eight (soon to be seven) residents as much freedom within the house as possible–even letting them all rendezvous in the library at midnight to tell ghost stories–with the agreement that they don’t do anything, well, stupid.

Of course, put a group of terminally ill individuals together, all of whom would do almost anything not to die, and things are going to get a bit freaky.

Hidden horrors are revealed with The Midnight Club Easter eggs.

Let’s take a recap before we talk about The Midnight Club Easter eggs and what they mean for a potential Season 2 that’s being hoped and planned for by Flanagan.

Warning: spoilers ahead. 

As the series goes on, Ilonka uncovers history of a blood cult at Brightcliffe whose leader allegedly had the answers to cheating death. Add in the record of a former resident at Brightcliffe who mysteriously recovered, as well as Ilonka’s growing stress from being terrorized by an old man and old woman in her dreams, her bathroom mirror and the halls of the hospice, and it’s enough to convince Ilonka that the ritual–minus member murder–is worth a try.

Ilonka also discovers that the basement of Brightcliffe was not only the location of where the blood cult–called The Paragon–held their ceremonies, but also finds a journal, authored by the miraculously healed Brightcliffe resident Julia Jayne, who took the minutes of her own Midnight Club. One of the pages is shown to be covered in bloody handprints and it’s pretty obvious Julia took part in the Paragon ritual.

Believing the ritual is what saved Julia, Ilonka convinces the others to join her in giving it a go. The ritual doesn’t work and, after losing a dear friend shortly after, Ilonka spins out, obsessing over The Paragon and Brightcliffe’s basement which, according to Ilonka’s forest-dwelling friend Shasta, harbors powerful energy capable of healing anyone and everyone.

But Ilonka’s hopes come crashing down when Shasta, who turns out to be Julia Jayne, manipulates Ilonka to get into Brightcliffe and perform a violent blood ritual for herself because, as it turns out, Julia’s remission wasn’t miraculous or permanent. A terrified Ilonka is rescued by Dr. Stanton, who also turns out to be the daughter of The Paragon’s founder.

After coming to grips with Julia’s insanity, and her own unresolved issues with facing death, Ilonka gives up on trying to heal herself. The last episode of the season mostly focuses on the members of The Midnight Club coming together in their common belief that they don’t need to be healed to find fulfillment in life, but should instead make the most of the time they have.

And, when Ilonka receives a beautiful, tear-jerking message from her deceased friend, she figures death may not be so horrifying. All’s well that ends well, right? But, actually, it’s still not all well for Ilonka. She still hasn’t figured out why she’s being visited over and over again by a creepy, blind, dead woman, why she keeps seeing a creepy, old, dead dude in the mirror, or why she suddenly finds herself launched back in time to Brightcliffe’s early days.

This leads us to The Midnight Club Easter Eggs, ones viewers might have missed, forgetting tiny details along the way if they weren’t watching the whole show in one sitting. And The Midnight Club Easter Eggs not only reveal potential upcoming stories for a Season 2, but answers to questions left unresolved from Season 1.

Let’s dive in.

Easter Egg 1: The Starlight Crystle

This is perhaps the best of The Midnight Club Easter eggs just because of how tiny and incognito it is. Let’s rewind to when Ilonka and the gang first discover the location of The Paragon’s blood rituals: BrightCliffe’s hidden basement.

Among the blood bowls, sacrificial knives, unsettling robes, and hour glass symbolism scattered around the room, Ilonka finds a large journal from Julia Jayne cataloging the minutes of The Midnight Club, which she and the other past patients took part decades before Ilonka and the others showed up at Brightcliffe themselves.

Having the exact same club name isn’t all together that odd. Stanton makes note in the series that The Midnight Club is a Brightcliffe tradition.

But here’s where things get weird. The book dates back to long before Julia was a patient, and shows all The Midnight Club members shared the same opening chant. After Sandra and the others decide to leave the basement, sufficiently freaked, Ilonka and Kevin, as well as Anya, stay. Ilonka reads more from the minutes of Julia’s book, realizing Julia’s Midnight Club and the current Midnight Club have the exact same number of members.

Julia also made note of her friends’ stories–one titled “The Starlight Crystle.” And in the next episode, during Amesh’s midnight ghost story, he titles his leading characters’ developing game, “Starlight Crystle.”

Maybe this is a coincidence rather than one of The Midnight Club Easter eggs we believe it to be but, knowing Flannagan’s eye for detail, most likely it’s a clue. It could mean that The Midnight Club is more than a club a Brightcliffe, but a curse where any patient that walks through its doors is forced to be intertwined with the past.

When Shasta, revealed to be Julia, is talking with Ilonka to try and convince her to do the ritual again after Ilonka’s failed attempt, Julia notes that Ilonka even has the same cancer Julia had. Maybe the house calls to those her are close to death? Maybe the house is hungry for more souls to repeat mistakes of the past? To revive the same stories in different ways over and over again?

Time will tell if Flannagan elaborates on these overlapping details. .

Easter Egg 2: Old People Possession…and Starvation

Speaking of hungry houses…let’s talk about the next of The Midnight Club Easter eggs: the old man and woman who are haunting Ilonka. Told later in the series by friend and fellow resident Kevin that he has woken up in the creepy basement, almost every night since he arrived, and is also terrorized by an old man and woman in the house, Ilonka realizes her terrifying visions might actually be real.

It is revealed in the last episode of the show that the old man and woman who repeatedly appear to Ilonka and Kevin are the founders of Brightcliffe and the original owners of the house. Not only that, but the old man, revealed to be Stanley Oscar Freelan, was also the house’s architect.

And interestingly enough, Stanley and his wife, Vera, don’t appear to Ilonka and Kevin the same way. Ilonka more often sees Vera and then only sees Stanley when she looks in a mirror. Meanwhile, Kevin usually sees Stanley and then only sees Vera occasionally. Kevin didn’t reveal how Vera appears to him, but it’s safe to say she has appeared in a mirror for Kevin too.

All this to say, it’s pretty clear that Stanley has possessed Ilonka and Kevin is possessed by Vera. Which is why the ghosts keep referring to Ilonka and Kevin as “darling” and “sweetheart.” Kevin’s ghost story also, coincidentally, is about being possessed by an elderly family member.

But that’s not the creepiest part for the second of The Midnight Club Easter eggs. Remember the old bed in the basement that Ilonka and the gang found during their discovery of Julia Jayne’s minute notes of her Midnight Club? The same bed Kevin said he would repeatedly wake up in at night?

According to the other current Midnight Club members, it looked like someone wasn’t just sleeping in the basement, but actually living down there.

Connecting all the dots, it’s possible Vera was either living in the basement on her own accord, or forced down there by an abusive Stanley. Is that why she’s starving? Well, there is another piece to this puzzle.

Easter Egg 3: The Painting’s On the Wall

It’s not talked about very often, but the next of The Midnight Club Easter eggs is a big feature in the creepy basement of Brightcliffe: the wall mural. For those who may not remember, the mural consisted of a highly detailed painting of the woods surrounding Brightcliffe and, included is the bench overlooking the cliffs where Ilonka first met Kevin.

It’s also the spot where Ilonka had a vision of Kevin before she actually met him in person or became a patient at Brightcliffe.

Going off The Midnight Club Easter eggs theory prior to this that Stanley’s wife was choosing to live in the basement, and the fact that the rumors about the healing powers of the woods had been around during the time that Stanley built Brightcliffe, it’s possible to further theorize that Vera had become as obsessed with her home’s location as her husband had been.

Julia, as Shasta, tells Ilonka during one of their visits that “There’s something very special about the spot where Brightcliffe is built, something very special about that exact spot. And the man who built Brightcliffe knew that.” Was Vera dying? Was she obsessed with getting better and harnessing the power of the woods? Was she the one who actually requested the house be built in its current location?

It’s possible Julia was making all this up just to get Ilonka to help with her own ritual. But considering the bed and living amenities in the basement and the oddly detailed mural, it doesn’t seem like a lie that Stanley and Vera knew exactly where they wanted the house to be built for interest in what the woods could provide.

Easter Egg 4: Brightcliffe’s Bright Girls

The last, but not least, of The Midnight Club Easter eggs is, truthfully, potentially not an Easter egg at all. But it’s interesting that not only does Julia refer to Ilonka by the nickname of “bright girl” in the present, but she herself was also given the same nickname by Dr. Stanton’s mother and founder of The Paragon.

This is not at all hidden in the show, but it’s not explicitly pointed out that both of these “bright” girls were patients at place called “Brightcliffe.” On top of that, Dr. Stanton’s name given to her by her mother is “Athena.” In Homer’s epic works, Athena’s most common epithet is Glaukopis, which usually is translated as, “bright-eyed.”

Meanwhile, Ilonka’s name, as pointed out by Julia in the show, is Hungarian for “Light.” The names “Julia” and “Vera” don’t mean light, but it does make one wonder where this “bright girl” term originated from and it seems a bit too perfect that the common location shared by these women is called “Brightcliffe.”

Maybe the nickname originated with Athena’s mother and it’s simply a manipulative tool to get the person you’re complimenting to go along with whatever schemes are being plotted. But the term, like ever other Easter egg on our list, could date back to the time of Stanley and Vera.

What are some other Easter eggs from The Midnight Club that you guys noticed? Let us know in the comments below!