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The writer-director Mike Flanagan has become best known for his adaptations of works by Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House), Henry James (The Haunting of Bly Manor) and Stephen King (Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep). The horrors in his latest project, Midnight Mass, a seven-episode limited series on Netflix, are homegrown.
“Flanagan has earned a reputation for what might be called
humanistic horror,” writes Darryn King of the New York Times. “Beyond the ghouls and goose bumps, much of his work is centered on deeply felt
family drama, populated by damaged characters wrestling with the everyday
terrors of being a parent, a partner, a human being.”
The Ringer lauds
him for “prioritizing characters and emotions over cheap scares and shock
value.”
Screenrant suggests that Midnight Mass “delves into a whole range of poignant
themes and even perfectly depicts a universal truth at the heart of religion.”
Set on the fictional Crockett Island, the series has its
residents fall prey to a vampire-like monster mistaken for an
angel and a renewed religious fervor. Both are unleashed upon the island
by Father Paul Hill/Monsignor Pruitt (Hamish Linklater) and contribute to a
tense and bloody conclusion.
While Hill House was a huge hit its follow up, Bly
Manor, was less successful but Flanagan remains a darling of the critics
not least for battling his personal demons so publically. Specifically, Midnight
Mass lays bare his experiences with religion and alcohol addiction.
“I come from a long line of drunken Irishmen,” he told the
NYT. “But my biggest fear wasn’t that I would die in a drunken car accident,”
he continued. “It was that I would kill someone else and live. That is the
beating heart of Midnight Mass.”
Growing up a Catholic he says the “scales fell from his
eyes” when reading the Bible, aged 12.
“There were so many ideas I’d never heard before in church,
and the violence of the Old Testament God is terrifying! Slaughtering babies
and drowning the earth! It really struck me that I didn’t know my faith at that
point.”
Midnight Mass speaks to his continued interest in
faith in its most extreme form. “I’m fascinated by how our beliefs shape how we
treat each other,” he said. “Looking at politics and the world today, so many of
us are behaving based on the belief that God is on our side, and that God
dislikes the same people we do.”
He first pitched Midnight Mass in 2014, including to
Netflix, which passed on it. Before that, it had been an unfinished film
script, and before that an attempted novel. Midnight Mass even appeared
as a prop book ‘Easter egg’ in Hush and Gerald’s Game, his own
way of keeping the idea alive over the years, he revealed to the Times.
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