Midnight Mass: Horror and the Big Questions
Small towns, quaint villages, and isolated hamlets promise only terrible things in many supernatural tales. Rural byways hold long-buried secrets and echoes of dark transgressions. Legends circulate of phantoms haunting surrounding forests or monsters stalking nearby shorelines. These habitats are liminal spaces straddling civilization and wilderness, the corporeal and mystical. Evil — true evil — is always present. Midnight Mass, the recent Netflix series from filmmaker and showrunner Mike Flanagan, falls squarely within this narrative tradition.
Midnight Mass is set in the Pacific Northwest fishing community of Crockett Island. (The show itself was filmed in British Columbia.) Crockett Island is dying. An oil spill polluted its environment and decimated its fishing stocks. Work is sparse and infrequent. Barely one hundred people still live on the island. Every building and house is weather-beaten and decaying, even St. Patrick’s Church, the parish ministering to the predominantly Catholic population.
After serving four years in prison for killing a young woman in a drunk-driving accident, Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) returns to his hometown. He finds himself estranged from its people and haunted by his crime. Judging from the posters for Seven and The X-Files hanging in his childhood bedroom, Riley left Crockett Island more than twenty years ago for a finance career in the big city. Now, he is a jobless ex-convict and recovering alcoholic struggling to rebuild a relationship with his devout family. A former altar boy, Riley lost his faith while incarcerated. His father, Ed Flynn (Henry Thomas) orders him to join the family for regular Sunday Mass. Since Riley is not in a state of grace, Ed later instructs him to refrain from receiving communion.
Riley soon discovers that he is not the only returnee or newcomer to the island. Reeling from her own troubled life, a high school girlfriend, Erin Greene (Kate Siegel) is now living in her deceased mother’s house and teaching at the local school. (This is a cliche running through many city refugee narratives: there is always a sophisticated, stylish, and beautiful unattached woman — or man — waiting in every town across the continental United States).
A mysterious and charismatic priest presides over the first Mass attended by Riley, surprising the entire congregation expecting the return of their octogenarian pastor, Monsignor John Pruitt, from a voyage to the Holy Land. Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater) informs the parish that Pruitt is recovering from an illness on the mainland and that Hill himself will be serving temporarily in his stead. Hill delivers impassioned homilies and seamlessly engages with the community, yet the details of his first Mass hint that something is amiss. Hill wears a golden chasuble, the outer vestment worn by clergy during Christmas and Easter liturgical seasons, and worships with an older translation of the Roman Missal. He evades friendly questions about his prior pastoral assignments and he possesses a deep knowledge of the lives and travails of his parishioners.
Shortly after Hill’s arrival, a series of strange events occur on Crockett Island. During a heavy storm, Riley glances out the window and believes that he spots Monsignor Pruitt wandering across the beach. Worrying about the elderly priest, he rushes outside to help him. The figure ignores Riley’s calls and disappears into the darkness. On the following morning, scores — if not hundreds — of dead feral cats wash ashore from an adjacent island. All with broken necks and drained of blood.
Then, the perceived miracles begin. Nothing good follows them.
Midnight Mass does not rely on cheap scares or excessive gore to propel its story or capture its audience. Instead, it builds tension and suspense by carefully teasing at the relationships among the townsfolk and methodically revealing the details behind Father Hill and his unorthodox ministry. Threaded throughout this narrative is a thoughtful exploration of deep metaphysical and religious questions bedeviling great thinkers and everyday people alike since the birth of mankind. The questions with no irrefutable answers. Can we firmly define the nature of good and evil? How might the guilty seek true redemption? Does anything await us after our final breath? Is there genuine meaning beyond the physical to this life?
The entire texture of the series is steeped in Christian and specifically Catholic imagery and culture. Prayers are recited. Rosary beads are clutched. Hymns are sung. The Eucharist is distributed. A product of Catholic schools and himself a former altar boy, Mike Flanagan long wished to develop a project drawing heavily from his own experiences and memories of growing up within the Catholic faith. Although no longer a believer, Flanagan still holds affection and respect for many of the churches and priests from his childhood and young life.
In an essay for the horror website Bloody Disgusting, Flanagan wrote: “Religion, I believe, is one of the ways we attempt to answer the two Great Questions that ache within us all: “how shall we live,” and “what happens when we die.” The lengthy creation process behind Midnight Mass helped Flanagan “to begin to answer” the first question, and the show itself presents his “thoughts, wishes,” and “best guess” on the second.
The grappling with these “Great Questions” is what distinguishes Midnight Mass from escapist genre fare. It attempts to challenge its audience — one unmoored by a remorseless pandemic, climate catastrophe, and democratic erosion — to ponder these questions and then recognize the stubborn unease accompanying them. This makes the series essential viewing this Halloween season. The scenes of horror and death in Midnight Mass won’t keep us up at night. The questions it makes us ask ourselves will.
