"AND HE WAS SORE AFRAID

Mike Flanagan’s Netflix limited series, Midnight Mass, is a delightfully refreshing look at that most well-worn of Gothic monsters, the vampire. Flanagan delights in spooling out classic Gothic accoutrements of plot and setting through a measured burn towards revelation: there is a storm, secrets that will unravel, and a vampire (mistaken for an angel). There is also an underlying pull towards the Medieval and a fascinating sincerity in the writing - there is no winking postmodernity to be found here.

 

            Isolated Crockett Island welcomes a new arrival, Father Paul. It seems that he is there to stand-in for the congregation’s elderly, much-adored priest, Monsignor Pruitt, who is rather taxed following a recent visit to the Holy Land, and will be staying on the mainland.  With an energy that veers close to manic, the good Father stirs up the town - he is excited about the upcoming Easter services, his sermons and very presence at Mass crackle with zeal, and he is very free with talk of miracles and belief. Like all good Gothic not-quite-antagonists, Father Paul has secrets - he is quite unsettlingly familiar with the rhythms of life on the island, and it turns out that there is a locked box in his house, full of earth. This is of course the vampire, bedded down in the dirt of its home ground, which rings rather Carpathian bells. This - along with sunlight as deadly to the vampire and any of the people it turns - is one of the few completely clear-cut vampire tropes Flanagan indulges in. This is a reworking of Van Helsing’s studious knowledge, that Dracula must lie in the grave-soil of “great men and good women [which] makes sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell”, though here, the sacred earth is scooped up from the Holy Land.

Later, framed - imprisoned - within the chiaroscuro streaming bars of the confessional box, Father Paul divulges the first of the story’s major mysteries. He is Monsignor Pruitt, it turns out, miraculously made youthful again. The miracle that has been so lavishly bestowed upon him comes from an encounter with the vampire, whereupon he is transfixed:

 

“Those eyes. Eyes and skin and hands, but also wings. A sense of great wings enfolding him, and his mind finally found the word. The word was unearthed by his fear like the tomb was unearthed by the storm. And the word was ‘angel.’ Angel. And he was sore afraid.”

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This encounter - indistinct, the vampire reduced to a sense of fearful proportions and burning eyes, the priest falling to his knees - is depicted in a manner that can only be termed Medieval, both in atmosphere and in visual allusion. After surviving this awe-full brush with the apparently angelic, Father Paul acknowledges the next steps as equally divinely inspired - the forced drinking of angel blood, which results in a restoration of youth and a new clarity of mind. “The blood is the life,” poor, brain-broken Renfield shrieks before biting madly at Dr Seward’s wrist, but the blood is also the life of the Medieval liturgy, and it is this motif that Flanagan not only draws on but revels in. The Middle Ages, moreover, offers up many records of encounters with angels, captured in the writings of (among many others) Hildegard of Bingen’s Sciavas or Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum.  Returning with a newfound zeal for Mass, Father Paul’s outlook remains distinctly Medieval. On Crockett Island, angel blood replaces Communion wine, and thus, transubstantiation - of a monstrously profane sort - unfurls each time the liturgy is professed. Deceptively innocuously, a general sense of revivification springs up - older people feel more sprightly, tiredness melts away, and fervency bubbles up all the more insistently in each of Father Paul’s sermons as the days tick away slowly towards Easter. Measured out at each Mass with ritual care from the vampire’s willing wrist, the angel blood is treated with the veneration due a relic. Indeed, “blood relics” and “blood miracles” were revered in the Middle Ages. Strikingly, these relics were often written of in ways that (retroactively) call to mind the way vampires grace Gothic pages or the ways Gothic protagonists wrestle with the surgings of vampiric hunger. An ecstatically-written example is the fourteenth century text A Talking of the Love of God, which depicts faithful fervour as wild with abandon: “And when I am sated, I want yet more. Then I feel that blood in my imagination as it were bodily warm on my lips.”

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These swooning excesses certainly read as startlingly Gothic, and are also mirrored in the way Flanagan pens the climactic throes of Midnight Mass. On Easter Sunday - in the dark, during the titular Mass - Father Paul begs his congregation to “Be not afraid!”, for “[o]ne moment of faith is all I ask. One moment of faith.” This moment is the visual language of the Medieval turned to most Gothic ends once the vampire steps out of the sacristy, arrayed in Easter vestments, bat-winged and impossibly tall. The culmination here is the vampire writ as liturgical pollutant, invading the sacred space since it has been renamed as an angel. No divine punishment is evoked by the vampire’s presence not only at Mass by participating in the Mass when it stands at the altar with the priest whose garments it shares. 

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            Midnight Mass’ coda is brief - the intoxicated excesses of hungry violence cannot survive the rising of the sun, and the parishioners of St Patrick’s become ash. Flanagan’s vampire exists throughout in its own type of liminality - neither quite animal, though certainly not human, perhaps the angel Father Paul professes it to be, and surrendering to its own profligate indulgences when it begins to hunt in earnest. Fundamentally though, it remains wordless - Father Paul swears, prays and vows that he can hear the vampire’s voice, that he communicates with it, but this is left entirely ambiguous. Other secrets are unveiled in the last moments before the sunrise - among them, that Father Paul has an illegitimate daughter, she and her mother further motivation for his attempt to rejuvenate the parish with angel blood. This, though, seems a much poorer contender when compared to the ferocity of his faith in his angel itself - his easy-as-breathing acceptance that he has, indeed, been graced by the presence of a divine messenger. Of course, in his hubristic rush to be not afraid of his angel, Father Paul seems not to recollect that 2 Corinthians 11:14 also warns that “even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light”.