Midnight Mass: Thats Fine, but Where are the Scares?

I only just recently spoke to it, and yet here I am yet again stating that for me in the final analysis genre film and television are first and foremost responsible to do the thing implied in their categorization. If you are in action from then it stands to reason that I expect good action, Though a bit over simplified if I am watching Science-fiction I expect to have some science along with my fiction, if I watch fantasy I expect it to be fantastical, and if I am watching a horror movie I expected to be horrifying or terrifying first and foremost, and here lies my main problem with he recent trend of supposed “Prestige” horror. The bad ones and there are more than a few, seek out prestige ( which many times means boring and incongruent ) as some sort of honorific end unto itself to gain some flawed sense of esteem amongst movie goers of a certain type and in the doing lose the plot and leave the horror and terror behind. Now I'm not one to be rigid about what horror or terror can look like it can take on many forms whether it be eerie, or unsettling, a flat outright physical scare in the form of something ghastly looking, or even a well timed jump scare but I do expect at some point to be terribly afraid (The Descent) or unsettled in my spirit ( The Witch ) or feel a mood or tone of eerieness ( The Empty Man, The Invitation ). Here lies my problem with director Mike Flanagan's latest offering “Midnight Mass”. I found myself acting like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park smugly asking the horror version of “Ah now eventually, You do plan on having dinosaurs at your, your dinosaur tour right?” because for the bulk of this television show it was not scary in any sort of interpretation or conception of the word. A great deal of the shows 7 hours for all intensive purposes is a drama. It takes about 4 episodes to actually get to the heart of what this story is and much of that is wasted on diatribes, overly long monologues, and bits of dialogue that are philosophical and emotional in nature, and don’t really connect to the scares. It drags and lumbers the pacing making some hour episodes feel like two. The frights themselves average out at about one per episode and they are very brief so that I never really settle into that mood of horror until the fourth episode and four hours is far too long to wait for any real feeling of fear in any horror format. It led to an anxiety that wasn't at all rooted in any sort of fear but in “when is this thing going to fucking get started?”

None of this is to say that Midnight Mass isn't good, it's effective as an emotional philosophical drama dealing with hefty themes such as grief, trauma, and addiction. There were certain bits of dialogue that mined actually profound territory and not just cutesy quotes like “What is grief if not love peseevering”. A back-and-forth between Father Paul and central character Riley Flynn was particularly interesting not for any one thing said before it was before how it was presented and the objective and fair in the way that it treated and validated each point from each of the characters, something increasingly rare in film and television when it comes to faith. The actors were mostly all some version of good, especially Hamish Linklater ( Father Paul ) Alex Essoe ( Mildred Gunning ) and Samantha Sloyan (Bev Keane ) who is a revelation! As Keane a devout Christian zealot of a very familiar archetype Sloyan sets herself apart through an uncanny pit of fire that burns beneath her eyes that so encapsulates the type of fervor, whimper, and anger behind a being like Bev it might have been the scariest thing about the show. But on that same tip about the actors there is a very interesting sort of paradox within a paradox where I found very few of the actors to be bad and many of them to be very good but also none of them save for a few to be great and only Samantha to be revolatory or as interesting as the dialogue wanted to suggest they should be. The show reminded me a lot of two of Stephen King books and it is clear by bow he is a major inspiration for Flanagan. Salem's lot and pertinent to this particular point Needful Things, but in their film adaptations what carries a story like needful things thstbis missing a sort of unsettling or feeling of fear and feels more closer to Stephen King stories like the Shawshank Redemption than it does His more clearly horror stories like “Cujo”or or “The Shining”, Is that those films had and Needful Things particularly in this case had actors who transcended even at certain the dialogue. It's important to have those kind of deeply fascinating and interesting actors like Ed Harris, Amanda Plummer, Max Von Sydow, and JT Walsh to carry and give power to the words that extends amd carries the load in the stead of fear. The same could be said in Dolores Claiborne where you have Kathy Bates Christopher Plummer, and David Straithairn. Those kind of sparks, those kind of fire starters are missing in Mass, and it makes the lack of actual scares and the lapses in tone and mood all that much more noticeable.

I like Mike Flanagan as a director quite a bit when he is at his best, at his peak in things like “The Haunting of Hillhouse” and “Doctor Sleep” he allows fear and his weighted themes to coalesce and congeal, combine and cohabitate the story. Genuine reflections on memory and traumatic experiences are consistently followed by genuinely scary haunts and scares. Mood and tone are set in and built upon in ways that engross and propel you into the story to such extent that makes it ripe for these scares and these haunts, But he can fall in love with his own bouts with exposition and philosophy to the point he goes on tangents that take him so far outside the space of actual horror, that you forget that's what you’re watching and that is a cardinal sin of any genre show or film. If I just wanted to watch a show on the themes presented in Midnight Mass I could watch Intervention, I visited this show to be scared out of my wits as well and those moments came far too sparingly. What I was left with is a show that still ended up being just effective enough to make me like it, especially as it pertained to what it has to say about faith, the fair way it discussed that and and it's contemplations (some of them at least) on addiction, grief, and suffering and how that connects and disconnects us. A show that had some powerful moments of imagery that was truly unsettling and interesting approaches to storytelling like when we are shown Father Paul's story with a combination of flashbacks and these wonderful wood carvings. Flanagan has a knack for certain imagery and much like Guillermo del Toro his creature effects and designs for haunts are always supremely well crafted, but the shows true capacity for greatness was undone by its lack of love for what brought it to our attention in the first place …the desire for a good scare not a college lecture on God and the after life. If the two had been married properly it would have made for an absolute killer of a show to be held up in the very eternity it concerns itself with, as is with the two quite clearly separated and scares only allowed weekend visits, it’s merely another strongly decent addition to prestige horror that won't hold up past the next weekend for me.