The origin of the great secret of 'Midnight Mass'

In the Netflix miniseries, Midnight Mass , at everything seems to happen very slowly at first. Actually, more than that, it’s an intuitive look at terror. One that shows that Mike Flanagan is one of the most relevant directors of the genre today. The program is a journey through a series of references to horror cinema, but also a reinvention of the figure of the traditional monster.

One of The great virtues of Midnight Mass is undoubtedly the plot care that Flanagan dedicated to his characters. But also the compartmentalized information structure about the origin of the mystery. Leaving red herrings around her, she also accomplished a feat in the vampire genre. Create a deep empathy towards the central character, the Father Paul played by Hamish Linklater . But also avoiding simple explanations about horror and beauty to create an unknown panorama in the genre.

As if it were a thread of events Basted together to create a specific type of emotion, Mike Flanagan decided to take a risk at the script level. During the first chapters everything pointed in the direction that what happened on Crockett Island was a ghost story. Of course, the immediate references were not only Flanagan’s previous works, but also his spiritual mentor. At Midnight Mass , the horror master Stephen King’s storytelling is very evident. And Flanagan seems to have become his most outstanding student.

So during the initial episodes of the miniseries, Flanagan built a rarefied environment full of red herrings. Zack Gilford’s Riley Flynn returns to his childhood town haunted by a ghost . Like Billy Halleck in Thinner , he commits wrongful death. And the apparition that torments him is not just anybody, it is the victim of the accident that landed him in jail. The image of the woman floating with crystals on her face is not new in the director’s work.

Mike Flanagan has already featured similar images at Bly Manor and at The curse of Hill House . But the immediate reference to a haunting presence that embodies the suffering consciousness of a character is none other than the work of Stephen King. In the adaptation of the novel Doctor Sleep , Flanagan translates Danny Torrance’s radiance into painful and fearful images.

This is a recurring figure in King’s work that Flanagan uses with the same intention. In all his books, ghosts for King are expressions of feelings . From hatred to pain, in addition to guilt, there is an internal transit of who can see them that is reproduced in the supernatural. Flanagan does the same and it is from that pain, that conception of the disturbing, that he advances towards the true mystery of the work.

Blood, fear and condemnation

Midnight Mass formally belongs to the vampire genre and is a free adaptation of The Salem’s Lot Mystery by Stephen King. In turn, the writer’s novel is a contemporary version of Dracula , as King himself admitted more than once. The combination makes the roots of which it supports in the story are essentially Gothic. But also a careful structure based on such sophisticated references as the work of writers Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin.

But like Stephen King, Mike Flanagan resizes the codes of late Gothic and romanticism to craft something new. Flanagan’s Vampire is a reinvention of Kurt Barlow from King’s fiction . But at the same time it is also a look at a whole series of European folk traditions.

From the perception of the Greek lamia, to the Slavic Nosferatu . Flanagan managed to build an essential monster that sums up the mythology of the vampire. Winged (as he was conceived in Sumer), pale and inhuman (in the manner of Count Orlok of Murnau), the headmaster created a hideous creature. But he also did something else: he placed her on a religious ground that moved the inner strings of the characters.

In fact, it seems that the vampire Central Midnight Mass has a direct relationship with the idea of ​​the undead descendant of Lilith. An idea that could also be related to the idea that Father Paul found the vampire in Israel. It is assumed that Lilith abandoned Adam and fled to the Red Sea. That being the case, Mike Flanagan sums up at least several lines from the central vampire mythology. He also does this by giving his creature a demonic appearance. One very similar to what the Israelites and various legends imagined around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

But the true strength of Flanagan was to create a story that is also related to several of the most famous vampire stories of recent years.

‘Midnight Mass’ and the pain of loss

Strangely enough, in the series Midnight Mass the word “Vampire” is never pronounced . Nor do we speak of old rituals to destroy them or of situations related to their essential nature. Actually, the script is more interested in continuing a transition towards the idea of ​​a nameless monster. And it is this caveat that gives the premise a curious solidity.

Mike Flanagan kept the secret of what really happened with Father Paul until almost the third chapter of the series. The caveat allowed actor Hamish Linklater to delve into the character. To do it also with a suffering creature, filled with a genuine faith and close to a devotion turned upside down by a fanatical fervor.

All of the above achieved that when his new nature is discovered, is a true tribute to contemporary vampires . Flanagan created an amazingly effective bond between the vampires of the island and the mythology of the monster today. Father Paul is a suffering creature directly related to Anne Rice’s vampires and who shares her existential concerns.

But unlike the monsters of the author, those of Flanagan are on the verge of total suffering that, in fact, is their sentence. The conjunction of perceptions about the human, the divine and the fearsome, are extrapolated in a dense discourse. In addition to the frequent allusions to the Bible and other holy books, there are also debates about philosophy. The insinuations about Epicurus, Aristotle and the root of good, sustain the discourse of the program. But at the same time they make vampires completely new creatures.

In addition, the program draws parallels between Catholic rites and old pagan blood rituals . Transubstantiation becomes a terrifying and real idea. Also the promise of eternal life. For its last chapters, the series showed its best cards and created a symbolism so powerful that it moved.

From vampires with radiant eyes like cats (hunted by the creature from the first chapter) to the great cathartic finale. The vampires of Midnight Mass are a fantastic and careful blow to an underrated genre. A new version of the vampire, which renews the proposal from beginning to end.