Netflix series Midnight Mass it turned out to be a surprise. Not only for the platform, that enjoys its success with the audience and critics. Also for fans of Mike Flanagan. The show, one of the director’s most personal stories to date, is a rare piece that combines several things at once. On one side is his ancient, powerful and progressive vision of terror. On the other, it mixes an almost initiatory journey through faith, religion and philosophy to end in a novel look.
What puzzled much of the audience was its unique quality. It is about a vampire series in which the word is not mentioned. One in which long minutes are devoted to monologues and in which faith is the great enemy. As if that wasn’t enough, Flanagan had the audacity to reinvent Stephen King to create something amazing. However, the director’s take on death, eternity, and the pleasures of evil is something else. It is also a journey through an old type of horror that until now had been relegated from film and television.
The genre, in an attempt to adapt to new audiences, evolved and in one way or another, has lost some of its conceptual weight. Something that Flanagan recovers from an almost literary look to a slow and deep work. Midnight Mass it might as well be the best horror production of this year. And we give you three reasons that support the claim.
Those long ‘Midnight Mass’ monologues serve a purpose
One of the big complaints from critics to the series has been towards the dialogues between characters. Some chapters devote long minutes to lectures on good and evil, philosophy, and religion. In fact, the weight of the program rests on the idea of the notion of the ideas that generate our perception of the supernatural. This is a risk that Mike Flanagan took that could have weighed down the very core of the show. Except for the ingenious way he constructed the box of mysteries that sustains the plot.
The dialogues of Midnight Mass they are long, deep and sustained in complex intellectual ideas. They are because the people will sooner or later face a threat that defies all logic and is in fact unthinkable. The universe of the characters is not open to the idea of a monstrous presence. So the people of Crockett Islanders will have to deal with the root of the belief in good and evil. And in this case, that intellectual battle is based on faith. For this reason, the long dialogues underpin what is to come and how it will be conceived.
Of course, it is not something easy to understand for an audience accustomed to another type of proposal. But Flanagan uses a few references to shore up the issue. As the characters have the opportunity to tell their stories, meditate on their experiences, terror thickens around them. Stephen King and Shirley Jackson used similar devices to show the substrate of their stories. The same thing happens in the cinema. Hitchcock provided several of his iconic characters with some of the most engaging debates in film history.
Another good example is Lamp, the 1959 short by director Roman Polanski uses the same system of analyzing terror from its origin. What are we afraid of? Flanagan emulates existential questions and substitutes gruesome scenes for something more restrained and painful. The premise of the series allows the characters to grow up, face their horrors, and ultimately die or live under their weight.
Stephen King everywhere
If you saw Midnight Mass, you found out right away. Beyond the shelf full of books at Zach Gilford’s Ridley, the imprint of the master of horror is everywhere. And especially from one of his best-known books. The Salem’s Lot Mystery published in 1975 is the main reference for Mike Flanagan. And the director does not hide it. From his vampire, so similar to the Barlow of literary fiction, to the town.
The concept is basically the same, but Mike Flanagan takes it to a new level. The perception of horror encapsulated in an isolated place with characters hardened and devastated by personal tragedies is much more sensitive. Also more mature and less inclined to justify his kinship with another horror classic: Dracula by Bram Stoker.
As any King fan knows, The Salem’s Lot Mystery it was a reinvention with local and local aspects of Stoker’s novel. Mike Flanagan takes the witness from King and creates a new vision on vampires. But especially, about the supernatural in the middle of the ordinary, the specialty of the writer. The perception of the terrifying in Midnight Mass it is a condition that is based on impossibility. As in King’s novel, the islanders have no idea what they are up against. The result is that explanations are then created from faith or philosophy. But especially, the condition of fear as part of something larger and more painful.
‘Midnight Mass’, the root of evil
For Pet Cemetery (1989), director Mary Lambert created an unhealthy climate that subverts the identity of the monstrous. Who are the monsters in Midnight Mass? The series guards its secrets carefully and gives the viewer an opportunity to speculate. But starting with chapter three, he confronts both the audience and the characters with the supernatural.
And it does so by subverting the idea of the terrifying. If you remember the short novel The fog of Stephen King soon the question about the monstrous changes. Trapped in a supermarket at the mercy of fearsome creatures on the other side of the glass, the characters must face their equals. Which turn out, in fact, to be as dangerous as the monsters that await beyond.
On Midnight Mass it happens the same way. The monsters are the island’s own inhabitants. Beyond the creature that is the center of all the horror, it is the reactions and justification to evil that sustain the plot of the miniseries. The result is a work that combines existential anguish, fear of death but also destruction of innocence and purity. With its twisted and grotesque vibe.
The atmosphere of Midnight Mass also remember At the end of the stairs (1980) by Peter Medak. The story of the film was based on the creation of a secret within a secret. The script joined story lines to support what appeared to be two stories in one about primeval evil. On Midnight Mass There are several versions about evil leading to an essential point: the way we perceive fear and the inexplicable.