The Parody of Religion in “Midnight Mass”
Skepticism about the origin of religions
Mike Flanagan’s third limited series for Netflix, Midnight Mass (2021), isn’t as scary as his masterful series, The Haunting of Hill House (2018), but Midnight Mass packs the intellectual feast of its devastating parody of religion.
Warning: spoilers ahead for the plot of Midnight Mass.
The Rise and Fall of Vampiric Christianity
Imagine what would happen if a priest were bitten by a vampire in Israel, but the priest mistakes the vampire for an angel, misled as he is by the vampire’s large, batlike wings. The priest brings the vampire back to the small, isolated island community in the US where he has a parish, and he starts a Christian sect based on the “miracles” of the vampiric powers that overtake him.
The seven episodes of the miniseries are named after books from the Bible — Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, Lamentations, Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and Revelation — which suggests a parallel between the story that unfolds and the origin of the Abrahamic faiths. The early episodes introduce the characters and some mysteries that baffle the community, including a wave of cat corpses that washes up onshore. These cats turn out to have been killed by the vampire, but the mystery…
