Mike Flanagan is ready to fuel our nightmares again with the Midnight Mass trailer
The Haunting creator's new Netflix series premieres on September 24
TV News Mike Flanagan
We already know that with Mike Flanagan’s Netflix shows, we should expect the unexpected. The Haunting was full of twists and horrors, with surprisingly sentimental moments intertwined within the stories. So, with Flanagan’s new series Midnight Mass, we’re going in ready for whatever spooks and nightmares he has in store for us. Netflix shared the first trailer for it and it’s already very intriguing.
Matt Saracen Zach Gilford plays Riley, who returns to his small hometown after he did something terrible—his crime isn’t revealed yet, because what’s the fun in sharing all the secrets from the start? He turns to faith as a way to heal, and attends sermons given by the town’s new priest Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). But with the arrival of Father Paul, also comes the start of some weird stuff, including a dead cat washing up ashore and a wheelchair-using teenage girl being able to walk after the priest asks her to come up and receive communion. We also need to mention the interesting song choice: this trailer features the oddest use of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know.” Given how the song’s most popular recent use in a trailer was for Winnie The Pooh, Netflix is trolling us with the track—but we’re all for it.
Midnight Mass is one of Netflix’s biggest original shows of the year, and it’s great to see The Haunting alums like Kate Siegel make their return. But perhaps what’s even more exciting is seeing how Linklater and Gilford fit within Flanagan’s terrifying world. Linklater’s characters are often charming and approachable, with the actor having plenty of comedy credits in his acting resumé, so we’re eager to see how he can use that charm in an eerie way.
We’ll find out if Midnight Mass is just as nightmare-fueling as The Haunting when the series premieres on September 24.
29 Comments
I wonder why Scott McGregor never made it as a filmmaker.
‘alums like Kate Siegel make their return’
not sure if being ironic?
I’ll definitely watch it, I guess. The thing is, I like Flanagan. He’s like if Ryan Murphy had the ability to tone it down occasionally. When he’s really in his element, his ratio of camp and actual depth works quite well as entertainment. And he knows how to make something really scary too.But it’ll always be a little difficult for me to take him entirely seriously after “Hill House”. He really took this smart, unsentimental, unique and terrifying Shirley Jackson novel and stuffed it full of ghosts (of which there were NONE in the novel), grandiose sentimentality and horror clichés.(Not to mention the fact that it’s otherwise a completely different story with only some fragmented, superficial connections to the source.)I guess as long as he doesn’t pull a stunt like that again, I’m okay. He should stick to more conventional material, honestly. He’s good at that. His Stephen King adaptations were pretty decent. And Oculus, which was an original story, was also pretty great.
Oh boo fucking hoo he changed the story. Adaptations don’t need to be literal.
No, you’re right, they don’t. And I never claimed that. In fact, I definitely put some effort into explaining why this particular adaptation wasn’t good, in my opinion.Why you would reduce everything I wrote down to some simplistic, generalized point of contention, I have no idea.
I felt Hill House took the themes of Jackson’s novel, such as grief and trauma, and ran with them in a way that justified its episode count. In a world where more literal adaptations such as Watchmen (and, I’m nervously but hopefully needlessly dreading, Dune) recreate the text while completely eliding the ideas explored within it, I’m all for so-called “adaptation in name only.”
That’s fair, and it’s not that I’m against this concept in theory. It’s just that in this particular case, I felt like none of what makes the novel so great made it onto the screen. Expanding and changing the plot is fine, in my opinion, but this, to me, missed the point entirely.Especially the ghost bit is something I don’t jive with at all. The complete absence of such literal manifestations in the novel is a HUGE part of what makes it great and unique. It’s precisely NOT another ghost story. It’s about a much more abstract kind of evil.
Is Jackson’s novel really about “grief and trauma”? That sounds like the sort of thing a contemporary horror maven would have to insert to make their story more prestigious (and don’t get me wrong, The Babadook was a fantastic example of that).
No, I wouldn’t say it’s about that at all. If there’s a theme, it’s probably loneliness. And mental illness, maybe, although the author has insisted that it is in fact a supernatural story (which should give you some idea of how much the show differs from it, since there is room for such ambiguities).It’s hard to overstate how little the two have in common, aside from superficial connections.And I agree, The Babadook is a fantastic exploration of grief.
“The Turn of the Screw” is of course another instance where the author just describes it as a ghost story but the ambiguity means people don’t accept that at face value.
A supernatural story is not the same as a ghost story.
Personally, I think so. The entirety of the story hinges on “is this house haunted, or are these people’s psyches haunted?” Have you read the book?
I’ll leave you & Old Man Schultz to hash that out.
So that’s a no.
I like all his features, but haven’t liked either miniseries. Hopefully the problem was that he was taking old ghost stories and twisting them into 9+ episode family dramas and that something completely original will fit that form.
I liked the adaptation just fine for the most part but it really shit the bed in the last 15-20 minutes. Between Hill House and Bly Manor he seems to have a knack for assembling great casts and giving them emotional beats to play but tends to have trouble sticking the landing. I’ll watch this though with lowered expectations for how the story ties up.
The problem with Hill House is that all the setup is for an unhappy ending, like the original, but that’s not how multi-episode family dramas end & Flanagan couldn’t bring himself to do that.
He’s so so so much better than Ryan Murphy.
In order to enjoy the Hill House TV show, you had to forget it had anything to do with Shirley Jackson’s novel. I have no problem with an adaptation making something their own, but there was no need force the audience to make unfavorable comparisons. It doesn’t help that the 1960s The Haunting is also a much better adaptation. There are so many good moments in Flanagan’s Hill House, but it doesn’t even come close to the novel or even the first film adaptation.
Yup, that’s exactly how I feel. If they had just made it into its own thing, I might have felt differently. But since they even chose to use paragraphs from the novel in the show, it was pretty much impossible to avoid the comparison. I can’t comment on Bly Manor, I haven’t read the novella (although it’s lying in a pile on my nightstand, believe it or not).
The 1960 adaptatation does indeed follow the original story much more closely, but more importantly, it showed a real understanding of how Jackson creates a mood and took its cues from the prose to forge its visual and auditory identity. Plus, a couple of small changes necessary to make the story work on screen.
Spoilers for his “crime,” courtesy of Tim and Eric.
As a Matt Saracen fan I will watch anything Zac is in but this actually looks super promising and just in time for Spooky SZN
i guess it helps that i already love that Keane song, but i am also a sucker for the “darkening” or spooky versions of pop songs. between this and the first teaser for Last Night in Soho, happy.
“Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Don’t be afraid of no ghosts”
If this is leaning into the whole “evil priest” thing, I’m all in. Or even better, if the priest is a conduit for darkness that he he doesn’t view as darkness, a la Clancy Browns’ character from Carnivale.
I was thinking the same thing about The Usher, although it’s a high bar to set. Clancy Brown was/is the most intimidating person alive. It’ll be cool to see Hamish Linklater go full evil, unless the trailer is all misdirects. He always plays these twerpy officious types, but Legion showed that he can get weird when called upon. I’m really looking forward to this. Seems like Flanagan’s loose take on a Needful Things kind of situation to me.
Clancy Brown was/is the most intimidating person alive.You mean him?(The fact that Brown has played both Eugene H. Krabs and Lex Luthor will never fail to amuse me.)
nothing this guy has made is remotely scary, at all
Haunting of Bly Manor completely wrecked me (except for the penultimate episode, which really should have been a 5-10 minute flashback). So I’ll be checking this out for sure. Does anyone know if it’s based on a particular novel this time, as Hill House and Bly were? Not that it matters that much, as Bly actually took elements from several James stories. Just curious.