Mike Flanagan’s Netflix shows have terrified subscribers with twisted ghostly delights like “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Midnight Club.” But five years ago, he delivered one of the streamer’s best horror miniseries: “Midnight Mass.”
Flanagan’s productions regularly land on lists of the best horror TV shows ever made, and “Midnight Mass” shows why. The series balances heart, tragedy, and horror in a deadly parable about faith and mob psychology. Set on the fictional Crockett Island, it follows a remote Catholic community whose lives are upended when mysterious new priest Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater) arrives to replace their aging monsignor.
Father Paul isn’t the only new arrival. Prodigal son Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) also returns home to rebuild his life after accidentally killing a woman while driving drunk. Their parallel stories allow Flanagan to explore redemption and corruption while taking a fresh bite out of classic vampire mythology.
Midnight Mass puts a Catholic spin on classic vampire mythology
The big twist in Netflix’s horror miniseries is that Father Paul is actually Crockett Island’s elderly monsignor, restored to youth after being attacked during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His assailant is a pale, winged creature he calls an Angel, despite its thirst for blood and deadly sensitivity to sunlight. In other words, Father Paul has encountered a vampire.
The creature becomes especially terrifying because of how it embeds itself in the community through the church. Father Paul secretly uses its blood during Holy Communion, seemingly curing members of his congregation of illness and restoring their youth while strengthening their faith in what they believe is a miracle.
Flanagan ties classic vampire mythology directly to Catholicism, telling Gizmodo, “The parallels between drinking the blood of Jesus and what I was reading in Dracula were unavoidable.” He also draws a pointed parallel between bloodlust and addiction. After the Angel turns Riley into a vampire, he refuses to surrender to his new thirst. In Episode 5, he takes Erin Greene (Kate Siegel) onto a boat and allows the sunrise to burn him alive, proving to her what is happening on Crockett Island.
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Midnight Mass shows how faith can be weaponized
Beyond Mike Flanagan’s fresh take on vampirism, the horror miniseries tackles his complicated thoughts on religion, as Father Paul’s congregation becomes bloodthirsty after the Angel’s gifts cause chaos in the church. The priest even loses control to fiercely devout Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan), who decides that only Catholics will be saved by God. She and her followers then go on a gory rampage against the island’s non-believers as Crockett Island burns around them.
“Midnight Mass” uses Keane as a warning about allowing faith to be corrupted by those who want to weaponize it for their own ends. Her religious hypocrisy is displayed repeatedly, especially in her treatment of Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli), whose Muslim faith she disparages before later mortally wounding him.
Flanagan manages to weave these heavy themes into a vampire story without sacrificing the horror. Five years on, he said “Midnight Mass” couldn’t be made today because of how Netflix has changed. So it’s a minor miracle that the show even saw the light of day, but thankfully it didn’t burst into flames.
