Midnight Mass

 Suzy Eddie Izzard has a bit from one of her older stand-up specials that I always found quite funny: imagining Jesus returning to Heaven after the Resurrection, speaking with God the Father, and the Father reacting with shock and dismay that Jesus had introduced this idea that his followers should eat his body and drink his blood: "You've introduced cannibalism and vampirism on the first day of a new religion!"

The Eucharist is, if you're not Catholic or at least culturally familiar with Catholic practice, a really weird idea. At Mass, the priest transmutes the wafers and wine into what is believed to literally be the body and blood of Christ. And it is right there in the Gospels, where Jesus says that the bread and wine at the Last Supper are these things, and a pretty core tenet of Christianity is that you take Jesus at his word.

I guess I should state here that I don't really want to get into a judgmental space here. My mother was raised Catholic, and a lot of her side of the family are quite devout. (My mom's own beliefs were a little hard to pin down - I think she remained culturally at home within Catholicism but was agnostic in her belief in the supernatural. That she married an atheist Jew, my dad, spoke to her comfort stepping outside of that circle). The point is, lots of people have lots of beliefs that will look odd from an outside perspective, and I'm not here to single out Catholicism: I'm just here to comment on Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass.

Released in 2021, Midnight Mass was the third of a number of miniseries projects created by Mike Flanagan, following up The Haunting of Hill House and the Haunting of Bly Manor. While the previous two were loose adaptations of previous stories, I believe that Midnight Mass is a wholly original one.

Set on the (I'm assuming) fictional island of Crockett Isle, off the coast of New England, the story is about a community that is dying out because of economic and environmental devastation that is thrown into upheaval with the arrival of a new priest to take over the local Catholic church.

Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater) is warm and friendly, and more than anything energized, bringing an optimistic spirit of someone who has witnessed a miracle.

Oh, and also, he arrives on the island with a giant trunk that apparently has something alive within it.

Yes, this is a horror story, but three episodes in, the horror has been played quite slow. Largely, we're shown a tiny community that is very tight-knit and centered around the local church, which thus manages to create a few outsiders because of those who don't fit in as well to that religious community.

This, of course, is the paradox of organized religion. There are few institutions, maybe none, that are more effective at bringing people together in community, but because they are built around supernatural belief, those who cannot or will not conform to the expectations of that community will inevitably feel alienated. Those within the community see the solution as simply converting those outside of it: to those within, this seems like a warm act of love and welcome, while to those without, well, it feels like the invasion of the body snatchers.

Vampires, as monsters, are near-universal. Cultures across the world have monsters that drink peoples' blood. But I think there's a special resonance that these monsters have in cultures where Christianity is dominant, because there's this kind of weird perversion of that which is holy: Jesus offers up his blood for humanity to drink and benefit from, while vampires take the blood of their victims. That vampires in particular are often said to be thwarted by religious accoutrements - abjured by crucifixes, seared by holy water - really places them, as monsters, in that religious/spiritual context in a way that, at least by the current folklore/pop culture associations, is not true for something like a werewolf.

Vampires are sometimes depicted as leaning into this kind of blasphemous, sacrilegious appropriation of religious iconography and practice. On a straightforward level, this feels like a cruel kind of mockery of that which gives the devout comfort.

But I think there's a deeper horror inherent in it that veers into cosmic horror: what if it's no mockery, but the real deal? What if the benevolent salvation promised by religion is a facade over something horrific?

Fantastical stories are rife with cultists who have been fooled by demons or other monsters into thinking that service to their so-called savior will bring about salvation. But how much more horrifying would it be to discover that this was not limited to some minor, recent cult, but some major, mainstream religion?

Again, I don't want to offend anyone with sincere beliefs, but it's this kind of dread that even veers into cosmic horror that I think is really potent.

I'm only three episodes into the show's seven-episode run. But we have had some rather huge reveals regarding what is going on. The show is only four years old, so I think I'll do a spoiler cut:

Spoilers Ahead:

Father Hill is only on Crockett Isle because the elderly Father Pruitt has not yet come back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We're invited to wonder if Hill has actually killed Pruitt or somehow arranged for his disappearance.

However, what we discover in the third episode is quite different: that Hill is Pruitt, rejuvenated by his experiences in the desert.

Pruitt, suffering from serious dementia, gets lost in Jerusalem and wanders out of the city and into some structure that had been buried within the sands (I've never been to Israel, but I'd suspect he would have to wander quite far to get into such a wilderness). There, in his mind-fogged state, he seeks shelter from a sandstorm, and within the structure is a winged creature.

The creature pounces on him and tears his neck open, drinking his blood, but then cuts its own forearm open and feeds Pruitt the blood that drips from it. However much later, Pruitt's mind is clear again, and he believes that the being in what he calls a church is an angel.

Now, as someone who understands his gothic monsters, we know full and well that that's a fucking vampire, not an angel. Indeed, the ruin within which he finds the thing was probably some kind of prison for it.

Pruitt, renaming himself Paul Hill, returns to his community, bringing the vampire in a box much like Dracula's box that was taken to Carfax Alley. And while the vampire feeds on the stray cats and, eventually, some of the people of the isle, Hill/Pruitt wishes to share the miracle he's experienced with everyone else.

While the show has not yet revealed this, it's pretty clear he's pouring the vampire's blood into the communion wine, and we're starting to see some of its effects: Leeza, a teenager who was crippled when her drunk neighbor accidentally shot her in the spine, is able to walk again. We're seeing others healing in various ways as well: an old woman also suffering from dementia regaining her cognitive faculties.

This all seems quite miraculous, but again, those who are ken to the genre understand that this seems to be some kind of gradual transformation into vampires. Perhaps because they weren't at the point of death when they drank the blood the transition has been slow. But even Hill/Pruitt, who is turned about as conventionally as one can be in these narratives, is restored to youthful vigor before he starts undergoing more troubling symptoms of his vampiric transformation.

Again, though, I think that the strange overlap between angelic and vampiric appearances invites that darker question: is Pruitt just mistaken and taken in by the short-term benefits of the vampire's blood he's now taken in? Or is he actually correct in thinking that this winged creature is an angel, and that the miraculous is actually horrifying?

Notably, the show sets up quite nicely that there are a number of people on the island who are likely not being dosed with the vampire's blood: Riley, our primary viewpoint character, is a recovering alcoholic who no longer believes in God after he struck and killed a teenager while drunk-driving and comes home to the island after he gets out of prison. Erin, one of the teachers, is Catholic but is also pregnant and thus I assume avoiding alcohol. Sarah, the town's doctor, is a lesbian, and avoids church because of the judgmental attitude she gets there. Sheriff Hassan is Muslim, and compelled to keep the faith (that he converted to) in memory of his dead wife.

But it's clear that they're in the minority, and when Leeza starts to walk again, the seeming miracle draws big crowds to the church.

Pruitt/Hill is kind of a fascinating character: I think he genuinely thinks he's doing good for the town. Troublingly, he insists upon running AA meetings for Riley rather than having him go to the mainland. As is typical with such meetings, coffee is provided, and so I worry that Riley might not be escaping the dosing as implied.

Flanagan is famously a big Stephen King fan, and did the adaptation of Doctor Sleep several years ago, and is evidently working on an adaptation of The Dark Tower (which readers of this blog would know is one of my formative reads).

King's novel Salem's Lot was, of course, a kind of modernization of the vampire tale - one in which a vampire manages to turn most of a small town. While I don't think this is a direct take on that story (for one thing, the priest in Salem's Lot winds up being one of the few standing against the vampires, though it gets complicated) I have to imagine that King's work informed it. King's horror is always juxtaposed with the ills of American culture, and this show's examination of how our communities push conformity certainly feel resonant with the kind of things King likes to write about.

This is the sort of show that I can take a while to get through: I watch much of The Haunting of Hill House, but hit an episode so upsetting (not just scary, but emotionally devastating) that I couldn't get myself to finish it. (Maybe one day.) I'm hoping to get through this one, as I've generally heard it's the best of Flanagan's Netflix projects (of which there are, I think, five?)