Netflix’s 7-Episode Gothic Horror Miniseries Is So Good, It Deserves a Second Look

Mike Flanagan is in the business of empathy. Film and television’s leading purveyor of terror understands that the best horror anchors itself in the personal. It’s a genre that projects collective fears onto metaphorical monsters, and the most lingering nightmares emerge from the horrors of being human in a world shaped by human cruelties. Whether it’s generational trauma or familial grief, Flanagan’s character-driven dramas use the fundamental shape of a classic ghost story to its maximum effect — they dazzle with atmospheric visuals and emotionally devastate.

Midnight Mass, his third collaboration with Netflix, might as well be considered a miracle. After several failed attempts to bring his long-term passion project to life, Flanagan settled for sneaking the title into his films as an inside joke about “the best project I’ll never make.” Midnight Mass was always as personal as a profusely bleeding wound; the writer-director shaped the concept around his small-town Catholic upbringing and his experiences with alcoholism and sobriety. In 2021, the seven-episode miniseries felt like the pinnacle toward which Flanagan’s sublime craft had been escalating. Five years later, it remains his magnum opus — a foreboding symphony of existential melancholy and exceptional beauty, equally impressive for its sheer scale and its intimate interrogation of institutionalized religion and human fragility.

What Is ‘Midnight Mass’ About?

Ever since an oil spill ruined their local economy, Crockett Island has become a living ghost town. Instead of offering quiet comforts, the isolated fishing village feels abandoned by time and ruled by uncertainty. It’s also the only place Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) can try to rebuild his shattered life. Four years after his inebriated driving caused a woman’s death, he returns to his childhood home like a literal prodigal son; he’s not the only lost soul who’s haunted by regret and grief, but being an atheist in the devoutly Catholic town complicates his already unsettled homecoming.

Riley isn’t the only semi-newcomer who defies Crockett Island’s expectations. Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater) replaces the parish’s ill Monsignor and revives the community with his disarmingly approachable charisma — especially once he starts conducting what they interpret as Biblical miracles. As the priest feeds their hunger for hope, his unexpected presence incites far more moral damnation than it does eternal salvation.

‘Midnight Mass’ Is Mike Flanagan at His Most Visceral and Intimate

Midnight Mass is the most coherently realized and profoundly wrenching of Flanagan’s endeavors, largely because it thrums with his personalized hallmarks. His team crafts a pure Gothic folk horror fraught with religious menace, something both graceful and dreadful at once. Whether cinematographer Michael Fimognari salts the earth with cinematically gruesome set pieces or sets momentous montages to Neil Diamond songs, the technical sophistication is marvelous to behold. Production designer Steve Arnold creates an entire island from scratch, one that fits the required moody aesthetics, yet in its recognizably worn-down details, pulses with nostalgic life.

The acting troupe Flanagan assembles is also nothing short of exceptional, from Gilford’s arrestingly vulnerable anguish, Erin Greene (Kate Siegel) emerging as the emotional centerpiece, and the mesmerizing Sheriff Hasan (Rahul Kohli), a widowed single father and practicing Muslim with the wisest words about theological practices. All jokes about Hot Priests aside, Linklater’s subtle work is the series’ biggest revelation. Paul’s determined conviction, desperate rationalizations, and soothing gentleness reels in characters and viewers alike until we’re clinging to his every hypnotic word.

It wouldn’t be a Mike Flanagan project without his curiosity about the human condition, either. His thematic preoccupations have never been as relevant or harmonious; ornate Catholic rituals, vampire iconography, addiction and recovery, shame, redemption, corruption, and personal accountability parallel with ease. This series’ true meat and potatoes lie in the characters’ one-on-one conversations about the unanswerable mysteries with which we all grapple. There are few sinner-saint caricatures during these poetic interludes — only Flanagan’s intricate character work as he forces his wonderfully foible ensemble to reckon with the agony of living.

And in an existence without clarity, religion can provide solace. A communal environment rooted in the creeds of compassion and forgiveness — loving thy neighbor as thyself — can be a beautiful antidote to humanity’s worst impulses. When good intentions pave the road to hell, or self-righteous proselytizers weaponize texts into a justification for their bigotry, then it becomes an arena for destructive hatred. Flanagan recognizes, with bone-chilling intuition, how the church is just as capable of being hallowed ground and a source of harrowing trauma. For those who were raised sitting in pews in front of pulpits, who have actively deconstructed evangelical fundamentalism and wrestled through our perspectives on faith, Flanagan’s masterpiece re-opens old scars. Midnight Mass‘ foundations are too painstakingly potent to dissolve into saccharine, but it does offer a bittersweet catharsis: if we’re all lost at sea, then tending to one another as the world ends is both the least and greatest thing we can do.