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impySo what'd you do last week? I apparently spent a good portion of it accidentally torturing Cass. How? Well, tis October and for the last few years, that means we watch a Mike Flanagan... thing. Mostly Netflix series, but Cass also had me watch Dr. Sleep at some point (too lazy to look up when that was, so it might not be October) so here we are. This year's offering is Midnight Mass and I watched it the Monday/Tuesday after it dropped. I should probably have taken the fact that there were two relatively sizeable (for us) earthquakes that I didn't notice as I watched as, y'know, a sign.
In my defense, most of the people on this side of town noticed a sound, not any actual shaking. And I live by an overpass and there are always accidents so if the boom I heard was the quake, it literally sounded like one car hitting another. At rush hour on a Monday. Anyway. Back to the show.
I knew that when we watched Bly Manor last year we wound up having the odd experience of thinking similar things while watching it (the pacing on Bly is glacial) but walked away with different feelings about it as a whole. I preferred Hill House and Cass took til this year to mention that she doesn't like Hill House in any form she's watched so... there's that.
I wasn't kidding about MM spoilers, so if you're gonna watch and have made it this far without being spoiled, seriously.
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If you're still here, I assume you don't care about spoilers. Sooooooo. Midnight Mass is an odd duck. I saw the trailers and thought we were getting weird priest comes back to the island at the same time as our hero, and weird priest is going to wind up having invoked the devil or some shit and bad things ensue.
Not quite. Yes. Weird priest comes back at the same time as our 'hero' and strange things happen, but they aren't bad at first. They're miracles. The local girl crippled after being shot by one of the islanders can walk. People's aches and pains are lessened. The town doctor's mother whose mind had seemingly been lost to dementia? She's coming back to herself.
For an island town that's been dying as the fishing industry dies, these miracles are somehow an even bigger deal than they would be for your average city dweller, I suppose. It's a small, small town. (fun fact: based on Tangier fucking Island, as my ex used to put it any time he mentioned the place) Kids grow up and move away and the adults do too, without bothering to try and sell their homes because who's going to buy them on a dying island? So, yeah. Miracles!
There are downsides, of course. A few people have gone missing. The feral cat community winds up washed ashore after a storm, all dead, none seemingly having drowned. And there's just something... odd about the new priest.
If you watch, it's not going to take you long to go, "sooooooo... Father Paul brought back a vampire, right?" And probably even faster will you realize that Father Paul is Monsignor Pruitt, only younger. Because ~vampire~. But they will literally never, ever say the word vampire. They'll dance around it and try and find some scientific explanation, sorta, but mostly Father Paul keeps going on about The Angel. Which is both frustrating as hell (you want to scream at someone, anyone, to say the V word, dammit) but also works because the show is set up that the vampire isn't really the villain/problem.
Nope, blind faith and religious zealotry take those honors, with a minor stop in 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' as Father Paul/Monsignor Pruitt isn't a villain. At first. I'd argue he's not really one til Bev goes and kills him with her poison trick and then we're dealing less with him and more him on whatever vampirism does to the brain in this reality.
Because his plan was basically, bring his petvampire angel back to his island, use the blood to help heal his congregation, and then maybe get a second chance at the family he couldn't claim because Catholicism is kinda funky about priests and sex. He never seemed to really have a plan to kill anyone. Hell, the plan was explicitly to keep Sarah and Mildred (the town doctor and her mother) from dying, and if the vampire blood could wind back the clock for him so well, and seemed to be doing a good job on Mildred in a much smaller dose, who's to say the plan wouldn't have worked until someone died in a fishing accident or crossing the road without looking on the mainland?
Okay, fine, there wouldn't have been any babies because the one pregnant woman miscarried to the degree that science couldn't even tell she'd ever been pregnant at all (downside to mutant healing factor). But that's never given a chance to be explored because the town menace, Bev, decides to test a theory... and poisons Father Paul, just like she poisoned town drunk's dog, Pike.
Seriously, I do not understand how ANYONE could not put two and two together when the show all but has Bev admit she killed the dog (if you have to resort to "can you prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt?" as your defense...) and Father Paul dies exactly the same way. And yet, and yet.
By the time episode 5 rolls around, our hero has died and it's become apparent that Vampire Father Paul is uh bonkers and definitely should not be around Bev as she brings out the worst in him. (She's the villain, guys. It ain't subtle. God may move in mysterious ways, but Bev does not.) The rest is a race to see how it ends and what the body count will be.
I personally found the first two episodes to be really, really slow. I'm not sure on the third as I'd have to look it up, but by 5 I was invested. Partly because as slow as the first two are, I am a sucker for a good storm and we get one at the end of episode 1. Cass... hated the whole damn thing til the end when Bev manages to fuck it allllllllllllllllll up. And even then she hated the series and complained non-stop, with multiple "I guess I really made you suffer with one of my suggestions, huh?" cracks.
Woman, you're forever making me watch reality shows, knowing full well I don't like reality shows. Yes. I have SUFFERED.
But since I wasn't trying to torture her, I don't think it counts. Sigh. I mean, vampires and small towns and blood covered people are all very much Cass things. We did agree that of his stuff, Midnight Mass probably sticks the landing better than anything else he's done that we've seen. I can't hold Dr. Sleep's ending against him as that's an adaptation and not just kind of in name only like the Hauntings were.
However, since it took me awhile to get her to watch (I truly didn't think she was going to any time soon because of the miscarriage storyline), I had to seek out discussions elsewhere. Which lead to a terrible Vox take on the show, that I shall not link because I don't wish to give it more views but you can look it up if you want, and how they could've managed to come away with it being somehow... pro-religion is beyond anyone. I don't mind people not liking the show. I think anyone who says it's perfectly paced is perhaps nuts, though I will admit that it does need time to set things up and yeah, it's gonna feel slow. But if your big takeaway is that religion is good and there's no place for that in horror, um... we did not watch the same show.
Because it reads very much as a show written by an atheist or maybe an agnostic and how dangerous it is to blindly believe in something. Parents literally tell their children to drink poison, knowing it is poison and will kill them, because they're sure it'll bring the kids back without ever stopping to ask "but what happens after the first five minutes?" That is horrific and that's where the horror of Midnight Mass lies. It's not in the blood, or even the animal deaths (thankfully the beach of dead cats have the fakest looking cats in existence), but in the imagining of how it would really play out in reality. Annnnnnnd to the exceptionally devout, or those desperate to believe? Yeah. I could see it. It ends, and I did warn you about spoilers, with the entire town, minus two teenagers, dying. Doesn't matter if you chose to attend the Midnight Mass or not, you died when the vampires raced through the streets looking for people to eat, or maybe when the homes and boats were burned. If you were turned, you died when the sun came up since the good guys burned the boats to keep the vamps from the rest of the world and the bad guys burned the town because Bev's a fucking idiot and didn't expect anyone to burn the church because, well, she's an idiot.
So while there is an element of beauty in the town's damned coming together before sunrise and singing, knowing they're about to die as soon as the sun rises, it's tempered by the fact that they promptly burst into flames and they're also covered in blood and have spent the night doing or experiencing horrible things. So no, it's not a feel good moment at the end.
Well, except for when Bev realizes about five seconds before the sun comes up that had she spent less time going after the town's sheriff, and spent more time fucking digging a hole in the ground to hide from the sun, she'd probably have survived. But Bev fucks it up right until the end and while everyone else accepts their fate, she's frantically trying to escape hers right up until the end.
In the hierarchy of Netflix Flanagan shows, as of now, I'd go with Hill House, Midnight Mass, and Bly Manor. With that being said, Midnight Mass is one I'm considering re-watching to see if I can pick up anything I missed in the "wait, wtf" watching. Hill House is on my re-watch list, maybe later, because I genuinely think it's better, but it's also the scariest of the three by faaaaaaaaaar. Midnight Mass is the easiest to watch in that regard, once you make it past Pike's death. I will say that if MM was trying to scare anyone with Riley's haunting, it didn't work. It was beautiful, but like Bly Manor's, it was only a bit jump scare-y the first time and then very much, oh, it's you again every time thereafter.
But truly the scariest thing of all is knowing that people watched this and immediately lusted after Father Paul in the scene where he killed a man, drank his blood, and then spent the night covered in said blood, just kind of out of his mind. Oh, humanity. You are so weird.
Next MF production we'll get will be Christopher Pike's The Midnight Club, which seems to fit in pretty well with his other stuff. I still cannot believe it's taken this long for them to take another crack at anything Pike related after the oddity that was Fall Into Darkness.
In my defense, most of the people on this side of town noticed a sound, not any actual shaking. And I live by an overpass and there are always accidents so if the boom I heard was the quake, it literally sounded like one car hitting another. At rush hour on a Monday. Anyway. Back to the show.
I knew that when we watched Bly Manor last year we wound up having the odd experience of thinking similar things while watching it (the pacing on Bly is glacial) but walked away with different feelings about it as a whole. I preferred Hill House and Cass took til this year to mention that she doesn't like Hill House in any form she's watched so... there's that.
I wasn't kidding about MM spoilers, so if you're gonna watch and have made it this far without being spoiled, seriously.
G
O
B
A
C
K
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
!
If you're still here, I assume you don't care about spoilers. Sooooooo. Midnight Mass is an odd duck. I saw the trailers and thought we were getting weird priest comes back to the island at the same time as our hero, and weird priest is going to wind up having invoked the devil or some shit and bad things ensue.
Not quite. Yes. Weird priest comes back at the same time as our 'hero' and strange things happen, but they aren't bad at first. They're miracles. The local girl crippled after being shot by one of the islanders can walk. People's aches and pains are lessened. The town doctor's mother whose mind had seemingly been lost to dementia? She's coming back to herself.
For an island town that's been dying as the fishing industry dies, these miracles are somehow an even bigger deal than they would be for your average city dweller, I suppose. It's a small, small town. (fun fact: based on Tangier fucking Island, as my ex used to put it any time he mentioned the place) Kids grow up and move away and the adults do too, without bothering to try and sell their homes because who's going to buy them on a dying island? So, yeah. Miracles!
There are downsides, of course. A few people have gone missing. The feral cat community winds up washed ashore after a storm, all dead, none seemingly having drowned. And there's just something... odd about the new priest.
If you watch, it's not going to take you long to go, "sooooooo... Father Paul brought back a vampire, right?" And probably even faster will you realize that Father Paul is Monsignor Pruitt, only younger. Because ~vampire~. But they will literally never, ever say the word vampire. They'll dance around it and try and find some scientific explanation, sorta, but mostly Father Paul keeps going on about The Angel. Which is both frustrating as hell (you want to scream at someone, anyone, to say the V word, dammit) but also works because the show is set up that the vampire isn't really the villain/problem.
Nope, blind faith and religious zealotry take those honors, with a minor stop in 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' as Father Paul/Monsignor Pruitt isn't a villain. At first. I'd argue he's not really one til Bev goes and kills him with her poison trick and then we're dealing less with him and more him on whatever vampirism does to the brain in this reality.
Because his plan was basically, bring his pet
Okay, fine, there wouldn't have been any babies because the one pregnant woman miscarried to the degree that science couldn't even tell she'd ever been pregnant at all (downside to mutant healing factor). But that's never given a chance to be explored because the town menace, Bev, decides to test a theory... and poisons Father Paul, just like she poisoned town drunk's dog, Pike.
Seriously, I do not understand how ANYONE could not put two and two together when the show all but has Bev admit she killed the dog (if you have to resort to "can you prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt?" as your defense...) and Father Paul dies exactly the same way. And yet, and yet.
By the time episode 5 rolls around, our hero has died and it's become apparent that Vampire Father Paul is uh bonkers and definitely should not be around Bev as she brings out the worst in him. (She's the villain, guys. It ain't subtle. God may move in mysterious ways, but Bev does not.) The rest is a race to see how it ends and what the body count will be.
I personally found the first two episodes to be really, really slow. I'm not sure on the third as I'd have to look it up, but by 5 I was invested. Partly because as slow as the first two are, I am a sucker for a good storm and we get one at the end of episode 1. Cass... hated the whole damn thing til the end when Bev manages to fuck it allllllllllllllllll up. And even then she hated the series and complained non-stop, with multiple "I guess I really made you suffer with one of my suggestions, huh?" cracks.
Woman, you're forever making me watch reality shows, knowing full well I don't like reality shows. Yes. I have SUFFERED.
But since I wasn't trying to torture her, I don't think it counts. Sigh. I mean, vampires and small towns and blood covered people are all very much Cass things. We did agree that of his stuff, Midnight Mass probably sticks the landing better than anything else he's done that we've seen. I can't hold Dr. Sleep's ending against him as that's an adaptation and not just kind of in name only like the Hauntings were.
However, since it took me awhile to get her to watch (I truly didn't think she was going to any time soon because of the miscarriage storyline), I had to seek out discussions elsewhere. Which lead to a terrible Vox take on the show, that I shall not link because I don't wish to give it more views but you can look it up if you want, and how they could've managed to come away with it being somehow... pro-religion is beyond anyone. I don't mind people not liking the show. I think anyone who says it's perfectly paced is perhaps nuts, though I will admit that it does need time to set things up and yeah, it's gonna feel slow. But if your big takeaway is that religion is good and there's no place for that in horror, um... we did not watch the same show.
Because it reads very much as a show written by an atheist or maybe an agnostic and how dangerous it is to blindly believe in something. Parents literally tell their children to drink poison, knowing it is poison and will kill them, because they're sure it'll bring the kids back without ever stopping to ask "but what happens after the first five minutes?" That is horrific and that's where the horror of Midnight Mass lies. It's not in the blood, or even the animal deaths (thankfully the beach of dead cats have the fakest looking cats in existence), but in the imagining of how it would really play out in reality. Annnnnnnd to the exceptionally devout, or those desperate to believe? Yeah. I could see it. It ends, and I did warn you about spoilers, with the entire town, minus two teenagers, dying. Doesn't matter if you chose to attend the Midnight Mass or not, you died when the vampires raced through the streets looking for people to eat, or maybe when the homes and boats were burned. If you were turned, you died when the sun came up since the good guys burned the boats to keep the vamps from the rest of the world and the bad guys burned the town because Bev's a fucking idiot and didn't expect anyone to burn the church because, well, she's an idiot.
So while there is an element of beauty in the town's damned coming together before sunrise and singing, knowing they're about to die as soon as the sun rises, it's tempered by the fact that they promptly burst into flames and they're also covered in blood and have spent the night doing or experiencing horrible things. So no, it's not a feel good moment at the end.
Well, except for when Bev realizes about five seconds before the sun comes up that had she spent less time going after the town's sheriff, and spent more time fucking digging a hole in the ground to hide from the sun, she'd probably have survived. But Bev fucks it up right until the end and while everyone else accepts their fate, she's frantically trying to escape hers right up until the end.
In the hierarchy of Netflix Flanagan shows, as of now, I'd go with Hill House, Midnight Mass, and Bly Manor. With that being said, Midnight Mass is one I'm considering re-watching to see if I can pick up anything I missed in the "wait, wtf" watching. Hill House is on my re-watch list, maybe later, because I genuinely think it's better, but it's also the scariest of the three by faaaaaaaaaar. Midnight Mass is the easiest to watch in that regard, once you make it past Pike's death. I will say that if MM was trying to scare anyone with Riley's haunting, it didn't work. It was beautiful, but like Bly Manor's, it was only a bit jump scare-y the first time and then very much, oh, it's you again every time thereafter.
But truly the scariest thing of all is knowing that people watched this and immediately lusted after Father Paul in the scene where he killed a man, drank his blood, and then spent the night covered in said blood, just kind of out of his mind. Oh, humanity. You are so weird.
Next MF production we'll get will be Christopher Pike's The Midnight Club, which seems to fit in pretty well with his other stuff. I still cannot believe it's taken this long for them to take another crack at anything Pike related after the oddity that was Fall Into Darkness.