Midnight Mass is the most recent incarnation of horror provided by Netflix. Featuring the same cast as The Haunting of Hill House, and Bly Manor, the creator has become a yearly spooky season staple with the streaming service. While devoted horror fans likely will shrug this off as just a another overly emotional attempt at horror that looks inside the wickedness of man, I feel like this may be just the thing that we need to really think about this Halloween.
Here’s where we are going to get into some serious spoilers, so if you prefer to wait and watch the show, this is your out:
Midnight Mass begins with a murder. A young man, drunk out of his mind, is sitting on the curb as he quickly realizes his drunk driving has killed another person. Several years later, now out of jail and an atheist, he returns to the island he grew up on, Crockett. Also arriving is a young priest, claiming he is stepping into the place of an addled Monsignor who had stepped away for a trip to the Holy Land. We are quickly introduced to Bev Keane; a deeply devout woman who has a serious chip on her shoulder and a psycho church lady vibe that is aimed at everyone but the Monsignor. The gist of the show is that a mysterious stranger (or is he?) has come to town with the promise of miracles and eternal life. While our outcasts don’t believe it (our former inmate, a young woman he loved who has returned to town separated from an abusive husband and pregnant, and a local doctor) all look at this like its some sort of hoax. If those characters seem fairly Biblical to you, that’s the point. A large swathe of the town, former attendees of the church mostly, come back abundantly to Saint Patrick’s church following the miracle of a young woman who is able to use her legs again after frequent communion. The doctor’s mother suddenly regains her faculties after years of suffering dementia. Back issues, vision problems, and other illnesses vanish. Of course, we know this is a horror television show and everything is about to come crashing down.
Like many people in the United States, I was raised a Evangelical Christian. While I associate my belief now as a Lutheran, that’s not to say I didn’t undergo years of religious trauma at the hands of the 1990’s Evangelical movement before that point. While I do believe that it is possible to have a healthy relationship with Christianity, (and I know amazing people who do) I do want to acknowledge that many of us (dare I say most of us) underwent the fear of the purity ring movement. We saw friends and family call those of the LGBT family evil and possessed. We saw people use the Bible to justify cruelty and sickness towards those who did not fit in. We have seen groups protest funerals with signs that say “God Hates Fags” and been pretty darn open about their hatred of a person being buried. I know more than one nightmare story of a woman who refused to leave her abusive husband because she thought she would lose her church community and be abandoned.
Someone with a Catholic or intense Protestant childhood definitely worked on this show. The music alternates into different version of famous hymns like “Nearer my God to Thee” and “How Great Thou Art.” These are songs I grew up with, and to hear them slowed down as background music was a little off kilter and while familiar, it gives you the heebie jeebies. Those with real religious trauma might find themselves deeply uncomfortable, and those who weren’t raised with religion may get that weird tug right off the bat that something isn’t right. I could go on for paragraphs about the Monsignor using the old based form of Mass at the beginning. I could tell you which passages of the Bible they were quoting to justify decisions made against residents in town without their involvement. I could even identify the Bev Keane’s I grew up with in my life. Oh, and let’s not get started on the title of each episode or the fact that there are 7 episodes (big number in Abrahamic religions).
After all, what is a better metaphor for forced conversion than vampirism? Children unable to say no to their parents trying to force poison on them while promising they are saving them? What I greatly loved about Midnight Mass was the fact that characters who were Christian weren’t necessarily made out to be good people. We have two perfectly wonderful characters seen to visibly practice the faith of Islam, and frequently being called terrorists by Bev Keane. In Midnight Mass, it is the people who have made mistakes, those who have gone through a hard path, those who have explored their fellow man and come back with understanding that see through deception and justification tactics. We see those who believe that they are trying to do good, realize all too quickly that their attempts to help have really hurt others and then beg for their forgiveness. At one point, a character yells to Bev Keane that she isn’t a good person and “God doesn’t love you any more than any other person.” She questions why that hurts Bev so much.
In one season, Midnight Mass causes viewers to question, not necessarily whether there is a higher power, but whether trying to use the idea of a higher power to force their fellow man into false expectations is truly wise.
A few trigger warnings for Midnight Mass: There are a great deal of animal deaths at the start of the death, lethal poison makes a play, and there is a ton of religious trauma and blood.
