Say Your Prayers: Midnight Mass Is Coming—And You’re Not Ready

No major religion survives the eons without being a source of comfort and reassurance to its followers, but if the incidents described in ancient scripture started happening in real life, it would bring people to their knees in a much more traumatic way. Healing the sick is one thing, but raising the dead? Doomsday prophets? Warring angels and demons, turning bread and wine into flesh and blood, and an angry deity unleashing plagues, fires, and floods? Be careful what you pray for.

Putting the fear of God into viewers, and everything that phrase suggests, is the central theme of the mysterious new Netflix series Midnight Mass, debuting Sept. 24. It explores what happens to residents of an island fishing town when a charismatic new priest (Hamish Linklater) arrives on its shores, bringing miracles and wonders with him. This being the latest from the creators of The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor, he also brings an unfathomable cost. 

It’s an original story, but draws inspired by a different kind of global bestseller. “It’s impossible to separate the Bible as a book from horror literature. It has everything in there,” says writer and producer Mike Flanagan (Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep) who also directed all seven episodes. “It’s overtly and unapologetically espousing supernatural, horrific events left and right. Even the hero of the story—God, the embodiment of love—drowns the world when he gets angry enough in the Old Testament.”

But Midnight Mass is not a cheap way to exploit religion for shocks. Just as Hill House used ghosts to delve into the dynamics of a troubled family, and Bly Manor did the same with a story about repressed love, this new show has more on its mind than jump scares. It’s a gateway to exploring zealotry and extremism, especially when those things are perpetrated with the best intentions. A longtime passion project of Flanagan, the series grapples with his own feelings about faith, morality, forgiveness, and how human beings can distort those things, sometimes out of naïveté, and sometimes for their own glory rather than that of the greater good they purport to serve. 

Trevor Macy, Flanagan’s producing partner through Intrepid Pictures, says several networks passed on Midnight Mass over the years until the Haunting series proved the team could tackle heavy emotional topics along with genre thrills. Flanagan even planted references to Midnight Mass in his other films, like 2016’s Hush and 2017’s Gerald’s Game, where it turned up in Easter egg form as a prop novel. Intrepid finally got the green light from Netflix after the success of the previous two shows, and was about to go into production in spring 2020 when the pandemic shut everything down. Still, they pushed on, and it became one of the first shows to resume shooting last fall once restrictions lifted. 

In a time where denialism has become its own religion, demagogues manipulate followers, and misplaced skepticism fuels dangerous conspiracy theories, the lessons of Midnight Mass seem more relevant than before. “I think the story is important to Mike because it represents nearly everything that’s important to him as a human being and as a filmmaker. He gets to touch all of those bases in one show,” Macy says. 

Flanagan was raised Catholic and served as an altar boy at his parish on Governors Island in New York and in Bowie, Maryland. That history heavily inspired the setting. “This isn’t about just Catholicism, it’s about the traditions of all of our religions, especially ones that reach back into the ancient world,” Flanagan says. “The ancient world was a bloody and violent and terrifying place where we didn’t understand the nature or the weather, or whether we’d live through the night or through the season. And every single natural function of the planet could be made to feel like a supernatural attack.” 

Linklater’s Father Paul arrives on Crockett Island as a replacement minister, explaining that he was sent by the diocese to tend to St. Patrick’s after its longtime pastor takes ill. As with everything Father Paul tells his followers, this is only partly true. He invigorates the desultory congregation with his fiery sermons while hiding his true motivations—as well as the source of his apparent power—from all but a few. The others simply aren’t ready, he reasons.

“When you have a parish that’s been presided over by the same Monsignor for so long, everything gets very complacent,” says Flanagan. “We wanted a character who could come in, start to talk at the pulpit, and have this entire community suddenly leaning forward, maybe for the first time. He’s as much an inspiring character and a galvanizing character as he is mysterious and potentially off-putting.”

The island is tired. Run down. Hopeless. Its desperation makes it vulnerable to Father Paul, although the actor behind him sees his character as less intentionally malevolent.

“He’s there to do good. He’s there to do the Lord’s work,” says Linklater (Legion, The Big Short). The actor bristles at the notion that the priest may come off as sinister. “In those old scriptures, the people who were prophets were always hated or feared or distrusted,” he insists. “They were often executed or imprisoned. I started to think of Father Paul in that way. He shows up and he’s definitely the most energetic thing happening on that island. He’s a boat-rocker.”

One person he identifies early as a trusted ally is Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan, Grey’s Anatomy), who is St. Patrick’s self-styled queen bee and administrator, ruling the community in no official capacity, but guiding it nonetheless with a fierce sense of puritanical judgment. She respects hierarchy, which Father Paul believes will work to his advantage.

“Bev has that dangerous combination of someone who is a true believer regardless of the consequences to anyone else,” Flanagan adds. “When you take a certain type of person and put God on their side in their mind, if you arm them that way, the things they’re capable of can surprise even them.”

She does not like to be questioned. So she will help Father Paul ensure that no one doubts him either.

Things turn Biblical fast: A massive storm hits. A plague of sorts causes dead animals to wash onto the beach. But then good things start to occur, things that should never happen at all. And they have no reasonable explanation.

“The actual miracles that begin to affect the residents of Crockett become impossible to ignore,” Flanagan says. “It starts small. It starts with things like gray hair turning brown or blonde again, and people no longer needing their reading glasses. Bad backs and arthritis pain going away. But in relatively short order, Father Paul, on the alter at St. Patrick’s, heals someone, echoing the kinds of miracles that Jesus himself performed for the sick. It takes the entire island’s breath away.”

But it also arouses the suspicion of two other outsiders—one a lawman, the other a criminal. Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli, The Haunting of Bly Manor) came to the island with his teenage son Ali (Rahul Aburri) after his wife’s death from cancer, seeking a simpler, and easier life for them both. He’s also a Muslim, which leads to distrust from the cloistered, mostly Catholic inhabitants of the island, who mock him as “Sharif” instead of “Sheriff.”

“What excited me about the sheriff was Mike had taken the iconic, real American hero—the sheriff, John Wayne—and then kind of fused that with America’s great villain, the brown Muslim,” says Kohli. “That really interested me. I spent a lot of time working on the silhouette. I wanted to make sure that the the audience felt that Sheriff Hasan stood and carried himself in a way that you’d seen before.” He laughs: “I was wearing cowboy boots all the time.”

Hassan is a man of faith, and prays every night with his son. But also like the other residents, he’s mostly going through the motions. “His relationship to Islam, I felt, stemmed from a way of upholding his wife’s wishes and making sure that our son was brought up in a way that she’d want,” Kohli says. That’s why it’s so devastating when Father Paul’s miracles start to enchant Ali. “It’s such a sucker punch for him,” Kohli says. “He takes that as such a deep personal failure: I’m not able to bring up our son the way you wanted.”

Hassan’s other true belief had been in the law. His faith in America, the justice system, and good of the NYPD was shattered over the years as he witnessed bigotry and xenophobia infect the institutions to which he had devoted his life. Moving to Crockett Island was a defeat, a retreat, and until Father Paul’s arrival, it was a quiet surrender.

Another Father Paul skeptic, Riley (Zach Gilford, Friday Night Lights), is an outsider for a different reason. He is a son of the island and was raised in St. Patrick’s, but is only living there now after serving time in prison for killing a young girl in a drunk driving accident. She appears to him each night as the show’s lone “ghost”— lifeless, bloody, and flecked with glass. Riley feels immense guilt, and defies his parents (Henry Thomas and Kristin Lehman) when they ask him to return to church with them. Part of him thinks it’s BS; part of him thinks he doesn’t deserve forgiveness.

Riley becomes a focus of Father Paul’s for this reason. The black sheep who must be restored to the flock. “There’s a scene that got cut out, but it was one of my favorite things,” Gilford says. “We’re sitting on the bench at a potluck and he’s like, ‘Easter. It’s great. It’s rebirth! It’s my favorite time of year.’ And I’m like, well, it’s a pagan holiday, the Equinox. He looks at it through the lens of the Bible and I look at it through the lens of science. It’s all about light and dark, and good and evil. I think that’s kind of what he and I are.”

For both Riley and Sheriff Hassan, the emergence of honest-to-God miracles provokes deeply personal doubt: If God is healing the sick now, where was that miracle when the Sheriff’s wife was dying? Where was the hand of God when drunken Riley smashed into that car and took an innocent life?

“He cannot believe in the divine intervention,” Kohli says of the sheriff. “If he was to accept that these things were happening, it takes apart everything he’s done to mourn his pains and his past. He’s existing and getting through, day to day, but these things can unravel like that.”

The final obstacle to Father Paul’s revival is a woman who is about to bring forth a miracle of her own, albeit an everyday one. Erin (Kate Siegel, Hush and The Haunting of Hill House) is pregnant with her first child and has returned to the island after escaping an abusive relationship. She is warm and open-hearted, and is one of the few people actually happy to see Riley again, despite his awful history.

She’s also a woman of faith, and is among those in the congregation when Father Paul creates his fervor. But she is not easily fooled. “I think that’s the message that Erin brings, hopefully, in the story, is that in a world where there’s fanaticism everywhere, she is somewhere in the middle and she’s listening and she’s making her own decisions,” Siegel says.

Flanagan, who is married to Siegel in real life, says Erin emerges as a hero “because she exists, like most people exist, between the two poles. That makes her more accessible for the viewer. Kate in the past, especially in the work we’ve done together, has played resilience and toughness in Hush. She’s played that iciness and closed-off emotional fortitude in Hill House. This has a warmth and a vulnerability and a softness that she’s never gotten to play before.”

“What I like to believe about Erin,” says Siegel, “is that she is the goddess that religion co-opted and turned into Mary. Her inspiration for Erin “is older than the Bible. She is mother earth. She is Wiccan. The only time you would see her in the Bible is in Lilith, who refused to lay down on her back for a man.”

Delving into religion, faith, and horror is likely to spark controversy, but the creators of Midnight Mass say they hope the series stands as an honest exploration of questions that people have asked through the ages. “I think it’s possible that people who haven’t seen it will have a knee-jerk reaction that it’s anti-religious, which it isn’t. We’re espousing empathy and moderation as opposed to fanaticism,” Macy says. “The show doesn’t validate or invalidate, or really judge, any individual belief system. What it does show is how they can be revered and corrupted. Human frailty is front and center in the show, but the show itself doesn’t render judgment. It asks questions.”

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