“Whatever walked there, walked together.” With that sentence, writer-director-horror impresario Mike Flanagan converted The Haunting of Hill House, author Shirley Jackson’s scabrously bleak meditation on the fundamental isolation of being human, into some sort of hymn to the power of family. As an admirer of the original novel, I must confess this is where I tapped out of Flanagan’s work altogether. I just couldn’t forgive so deliberate a missing-of-the-point, no matter how much praise Ouija: Origin of Evil may have received.
So his latest Netflix project, Midnight Mass, is a bit of a hard sell, even if some of its elements—isolated island, charismatic and possibly evil priest, cat-eating vampires—are right up my alley. Can it transcend its creator’s tendency toward treacly sentimentality and let the scares do the talking?
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