I don’t know where creator/director/showrunner/co-writer Mike Flanagan is going to go with this story in the end, and certainly the hopepunk makeover he gave to Shirley Jackson’s brutal The Haunting of Hill House inspires little confidence. But so far—so far—he sure does seem to be likening Roman Catholicism and Christianity more broadly to, yes, a vampire, profiting off the suffering of the communities on which it battens itself. And that’s something worth a personal confession, of sorts.
The priest who confirmed me was a child molester, and you can read legendary newspaperman Jimmy Breslin’s column about the horror he wrought right here, if you can stomach it. A priest on the faculty of my all-boys Catholic high school was a predator as well; last time I checked, he enjoyed a Vatican sinecure. So even aside from wider questions of doctrine, of historical atrocities, of Catholicism’s role as a bastion of present-day right-wing revanchism from the Supreme Court on down, I get it.
I reviewed the fifth episode of Midnight Mass for Decider.
Tags: decider, horror, midnight mass, reviews, TV, TV reviews