I have done my best to write a spoiler-free piece about Midnight Mass. Light spoilers are unavoidable, but I promise I have preserved the most major of twists and turns.
Horror centered on faith and religion has percolated through the genre since its earliest days, stories sprouting from the festering fears of demons, witches, and the Devil in all his incarnations. It is a sub-genre rife for use, and one that gashes nerves, especially for the more devout audience members. I would not consider myself a religious person, but I grew up hearing about my father’s time in a Catholic seminary, a path he opted out of just before the priesthood. I like to joke that I ended up with all the guilt and none of the fun stuff like faith. As I discovered my love of horror, we talked about The Exorcist, a movie he deemed the most terrifying thing he had ever seen because of its Catholic roots. When I finally watched the film it was unsettling, although not as disturbing to me as it was to him. What did stick with me was Father Karras’s grappling with life, death, and trauma. I invoke that film, and that character because Mike Flanagan’s new limited series Midnight Mass is about as Catholic as horror can come, and through his writing and directing, Flanagan filters the hopes of horrors of humanity through the faith and traumas of Crockett Island’s small and isolated community.
Midnight Mass may not have an eponymous haunted house like Flanagan’s previous two limited series, but the location and the ensemble’s relationship to it are as vital as the relationships Flanagan’s other characters have with their cursed mansions. Islands by definition are sequestered, forced unto self-reliance because any storm or mainland disturbance could mean total isolation. We enter Crockett Island in the midst of general malaise and economic collapse spurred on by an oil spill a few years before that decimated the fishing community. Houses sit empty. Residents struggle to get by. Flanagan populates these folks mostly with families[1], each of them processing, or repressing, their own private traumas. Riley Flynn has just come back home after four years in prison, the result of a manslaughter charge after a drunken night behind the wheel. His parents Annie and Henry are in the throes of economic tribulation and are now in conflict over how to handle their son’s return. Sheriff Hassan and his son Ali, the only two Muslim residents of Crockett, grapple with a strained relationship centered on Ali wanting to forge his own path and his father’s terror at what that may lead to. The pregnant Erin Greene lives in the shadow of her alcoholic and abusive mother, processing the cruel marriage she has only recently escaped.
The backdrop of all these families and sorrows is Crockett’s burgeoning Catholic community, centered on St. Patrick’s Church, a small, old, wooden building that represents their hopes that unending faith will reward them with a better world beyond the island. It also happens to be the place from which the truly demonic parts, both literally and figuratively, of Midnight Mass proliferate. There is much talk of “God working through us” in Midnight Mass and by that principle the most twisted bits of our world as fashioned for this show by Flanagan’s mind work through the zealous church member Beverly Keane.
Yes, there are supernatural elements afoot, but Keane is in my mind the most chilling monster of the bunch. Keane brandishes Catholicism the way Michael Myers does his knife: without concern for human life. Late in the series, Annie Flynn tells Keane that “God doesn’t love you more than anybody else,” a statement that Keane violently disagrees with. In crafting her, Flanagan has constructed a character who is the personification of Catholic hypocrisy, particularly the American brand. Keane contorts scripture to suit her every whim, deploying it just as easily to guilt her neighbors into giving exorbitant donations to the church as to verbally assault Sheriff Hassan about how his choice to practice a different faith than hers is an affront to her very being. As the series progresses into its more bloodthirsty narrative beats, Keane does not waver in her ability to justify savagery through the Gospel. She is not alone in this approach, but it is hard to disagree that she is the embodiment of its sharpest edges. Samantha Sloyan’s performance to bring her to life is one of the most chilling pieces of acting I have seen.
In conjunction with the quintessential horror elements, Flanagan and company also devote a predominant amount of the runtime to conversations between characters that plumb the depths of existential reckonings with what it means to live. Others have already written about the multitude of monologues in Midnight Mass, but many of those pieces do so with an air of disparagement, suggesting that Midnight Mass suffers as a result of all the talking. I find myself taking a stance in direct opposition. There is no denying that Midnight Mass has an aura of capital-T-Theatricality to it because of these monologues and dialogues, but that serves to ennoble it not depreciate its effectiveness. There are fewer jump scares or spine-tingling uses of negative space here, but in their place are devastating conversations about (among other things) what it means to believe, the cruelty of addiction, and the grieving of missed opportunities. In one particularly stunning scene, a young girl named Leeza who was left paralyzed from the waist-down, confronts Joe, the man who drunkenly shot her in a “hunting accident.” It is a searing scene focused on rage, loss, and the possibility of forgiveness. Each of these monologues forces us to confront our own mortality and faults, and so when we return to the sadistic corners of the show we continue asking these questions, projecting their heft onto the terrors at hand.
In totality, Midnight Mass contains fewer traces of modern horror than Hill House or Bly Manor, resembling instead a more classical breed of horror filmmaking akin to James Whale’s Frankenstein. This series exists to philosophize about the meaning of faith and the fiendish actions that those who seek to pervert it for their own gain will take in pursuit of power. You may therefore find that it is not quite the show you were expecting, but I promise you that even so, it will not disappoint you.
Notes:
[1] Writing about Flanagan’s work, I often think of Leo Tolstoy’s opening sentence of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Midnight Mass is streaming on Netflix.
Devin McGrath-Conwell is a graduate of Middlebury College currently working on a Screenwriting MFA at Emerson College. His work has also appeared on portlandfilmreview.com where he is a staff writer, cbsnews.com, and in The Middlebury Campus. He has been lucky enough to have his screenwriting produced in the short film Locally Sourced, which he also directed, and the web series Lambert Hall. If you enjoy his work, follow him on Twitter @devintwonames where he regularly tweets into the abyss about film, television, and, of course, horror.
