Midnight Mass is a show from Mike Flanagan, who also made The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, both of which were incredible and I highly recommend watching them. I originally watched Hill House because one of my favorite r/nosleep writers, The_Dalek_Emperor, worked on that show. And I loved it. Hill House and Bly Manor are both excellent pieces of storytelling and Midnight Mass is just as good. However, whereas Hill House and Bly Manor deal with ghosts, Midnight Mass is its own thing.
If Mike Flanagan being behind this show wasn't already enough of a reason to watch Midnight Mass, here's another: A lot of the cast from Hill House and Bly Manor came back for this show, including Rahul Kohli (who I wish we saw more of this time around) and Kate Siegel. On top of that, Zach Gilford from Friday Night Lights also appears on the show. Zach Gilford has this real..."Aww, shucks" thing about him. Like Jimmy Stewart. (I'm not saying they're similar in any way other than that.) I don't know, maybe I just see him that way because of his character in Friday Night Lights. Either way, I like him as an actor.
Midnight Mass is about an island that consists of a small fishing community. It kind of reminds me of Innsmouth. It looks like the Fishing Hamlet from Bloodborne. This community isn't doing great. Some of the townsfolk are very religious, which is fine...At first. But they begin to experience "miracles" and because of that, they become more devout. More people start going to mass. And again, that's fine...But it begins to become cult-like. I'm not religious, but I don't see anything wrong with other people being religious until they become extremists and use their beliefs as an excuse to hurt other people. I'm just going to say it, I hate Bev. She was manipulative, racist and just pretty awful in general. She reminded me a lot of that evil hag from The Mist. You know, the one who when she died, everyone in the movie theater cheered. I was so annoyed every time she opened her mouth. She is the problem, people like that are the problem. There is something so unsettling about watching a person like her manipulate otherwise good people...And taking them down this rabbit hole that pretty much leads to hell. And yeah, Bev wasn't responsible for all of it. But whereas the other person seemed to have good intentions (again, the road to hell, right?), she never did. So without giving too much away, this show is pretty much about a normal town being manipulated into cult-like behavior. And the way it's done is kind of brilliant, in a really terrifying way. Everything these people are told makes sense based on the Bible. But it clearly is not what it seems.
I do have to say that in the first two episodes, animals die. I want to point that out because if you're like me, that's going to bother you. A lot. You see like, 100 dead cats and a dog dies. And it's not like it's two seconds and it's over with. These scenes go on forever. It's awful. I ended up fast forwarding a lot of it because I couldn't deal with it. I know it's fake, but it's still upsetting.
Overall...I liked Midnight Mass a lot. Great acting, great storytelling. I think this is probably the creepiest of the three shows I mentioned in this post. It's extremely disturbing and upsetting. I pretty much sobbed for the last 15 minutes of episode 7. In my opinion, the plot of Midnight Mass is more interesting than Hill House and Bly Manor, but at the same time, one of the plot points is like...My least favorite thing in horror movies, I usually find that particular thing extremely boring (again, trying to be vague) so part of me was like, Are you kidding? But it really wasn't boring, thankfully. I also found this particular thing to be very predictable, like I said, I figured it out in the first episode. Maybe it was supposed to be obvious.
SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON.
It's a vampire. I don't care if they believe it's an angel, it's a vampire. This show was Jonestown meets 30 Days of Night. That's all I wanted to say.
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