Netflix isn’t content with breaking its own records for hours streamed, like its latest horror series. the midnight club just broke a record in its opening episode.

Led by one of horror’s best new minds in Mike Flanagan, the series has wasted no time establishing itself. the Midnight mass The creator’s new series bills itself as a horror-thriller mystery as it looks to make 2022 as impressive as its 2021 was. It’s looking good so far, with the first episode breaking a record.

the midnight club The pilot broke a Guinness World Record that can’t be beaten again anytime soon, and won the gong for most jump scares in a single TV episode. With 21 scripted jump scares, Flanagan was presented with the world record for him during a presentation at New York Comic-Con, and he talked more about why he did it.

Flanagan says that he has been instructed to add more horror elements into his works, and has said that he has no respect for jump scares, believing them to be “the worst thing”. There’s a real reason his series has included so many, and it’s a definite act of pettiness and sharp writing.

“This is particularly important to me because I hate scares and I think they are the worst. For my entire career, people have been like, put more jump scares and make them faster! […] The notes were already coming in, ‘time to do jump scares’. So I thought, let’s do them all at once and if we do it right, a jump scare won’t make sense for the rest of the series and we’ll just destroy him and kill him, eventually, until he’s dead.”

An act of active subversion of the tropes also has another side for Flanagan, with him saying it’s all part of his diabolical plan to eliminate the jump scare forever by playing both sides.

“Now I have my name in the Guinness Book of Scare World Records, which means the next time I get the note I can say, ‘As the current world record holder for scares, I can tell you that I don’t think we need one here. And that It’s my whole strategy.”

the midnight club will be released on Netflix starting October 7th as it continues to cement itself as one of the best in the genre.