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Why start an aftershow before the show is available to watch? Because we are going to first give our overall review and tell you that you need to watch Midnight Mass.
- (0:00) – Welcome
- (1:33) – Synopsis
- (4:37) – Themes
- (17:56) – Score
- (20:20) – A Letter From Mike Flanagan
Synopsis
An isolated island community experiences miraculous events – and frightening omens – after the arrival of a charismatic, mysterious young priest.
Riley also returns home to Crockett island following his incarceration for the accidental slaying of a young woman while he was driving drunk.
As we experience a community threatened by the death of their fishing industry, and an aging populace, we suddenly see new life being breathed into the church.
Midnight Mass brings us an even handed look at the themes of religion, death, and what it means to live a good life amongst those who do evil even when they believe themselves to be acting in the name of God.
Score
10/10
A Letter From Mike Flanagan
Welcome to Crockett Island.
I’m just going to admit it—Midnight Mass is my favorite project so far. I don’t like saying things like that, as filmmakers are meant to fall in love with whatever we are working on at a given time—it’d be impossible to do the work if we didn’t—but this one is truly special to me.
This project is more than a decade in the making. You may have noticed Midnight Mass as Maddie’s novel in Hush, or on the shelf in Gerald’s Game—two cameos that let me keep the project alive when it looked like no one would make it. When people on set asked me what Midnight Mass was, I smiled and told them it was the “best thing I never made”.
As a former altar boy, about to celebrate 3 years of sobriety, it’s not hard to see what makes this so personal. It is also born of the things that scare me the most. The ideas that animate my work always scare me—but the ideas at the root of Midnight Mass terrify me to my core.Horror is an essential genre. It helps us develop bravery and courage in very small increments. It also gives us a safe place to examine the most uncomfortable truths about ourselves as individuals and as a society. The horrors and mysteries of Midnight Mass are some of the deepest—and the darkest—I’ve ever explored.
The isolated community of Crockett Island sits, surrounded by grey water and overcast skies. While there are dark forces at work that are absolutely supernatural, this show is also about the most potent types of horrors—the horrors born of human nature. Horrors of fanaticism, corruption, and blind faith.
Along with the figures who lurk in the shadows, whose plans for Crockett Island are far more sinister than we know, this show is about how belief shapes our communities, our world, and our fates. It’s a show about faith, fanaticism, addiction, recovery, destruction and redemption.
The darkness that animates this story isn’t hard to see in our world, unfortunately. We see it in religious and political fundamentalism, in tribalism and racism, in science-denial, in systemic corruption, and in the eyes of normal citizens moved to acts of violence and horror by belief systems that have exploited their prejudices, fears, and blind faith. It speaks to a malignant insanity that has become absolutely normalized in our world. And as Carl Sagan said, “there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
It’s about something else as well: faith itself. One of the great mysteries of human nature. How even in the darkness, in the worst of it, in the absence of light—and hope—we sing.
I hope you enjoy our song.
Mike Flanagan
Creator/Showrunner
Midnight Mass Press Materials