The first episode of Midnight Mass begins with a death and a prayer.Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), a tech businessman with a drinking problem, has just plowed his convertible into a Volkswagen Beetle, killing its young driver. He stares disbelievingly at the red-and-blue police lights reflected in the broken glass shards on the woman’s mangled face, her fresh corpse the equivalent of a macabre light show.Midnight Mass Season 1 Download
Riley immediately begins to say the Lord’s Prayer — “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name …” — when a cop cleaning Riley’s wounds interrupts him. “While you’re at it,” the officer suggests, “why don’t you ask Him why He always takes the kids, while the drunk fucks walk away with scratches.Midnight Mass, the third Netflix original from the platform’s official horror auteur Mike Flanagan, certainly belongs in the scary section of the Netflix library alongside his two previous series, The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. But as that post-accident exchange implies, this seven-episode limited series, which premieres tomorrow, is less interested in bumps in the night than exploring spiritual questions and the role organized religion plays in uniting and dividing American communities. As the details in Flanagan’s latest limited series, and his best so far, come into focus, it becomes clear that Midnight Mass actually is, in part, an indictment of extreme Evangelical Christianity. But, as in the best horror, this message creeps its way into the storytelling subtly, enabling you to absorb the broader points Flanagan makes about groupthink and moral superiority without feeling like they’re being slammed into your head with Thor’s hammer.Most good horror comes from a play of allegory, where the thing that scares us might look like a killer clown or a ghost or a magic-wielding traveler with a funny hat, but it’s really addiction or grief or anything repressed. Like King, Flanagan has a gift for sometimes pushing that subtext far past the surface. A genre fan might at first be disappointed — “But wait, I was promised telekinetic murderous hamster-people, and you’re giving me a 45-minute AA meeting” — only to have the snot scared out of them when the telekinetic murderous hamster-person devours our hero’s sponsor.