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My thoughts on this horror series came three years after it was released, but better late than never, right? I think Midnight Mass brings originality to the vampire horror genre. Stories about vampires that look like grotesques (a form of ornamental monument, not unlike gargoyles) or like demons from hell aren’t typical.
The second time I watched it I saw it in a different light due to a book I did read between the two times I watched the miniseries. This think piece is my attempt to communicate the feelings I got from the second watch.
Mike Flanagan said that Stephen King influenced him for this horror series, and I think I understand some of the meaning of that statement.
He’s drawing from folklore from other countries and giving them an American spin, in a setting that culturally references Stephen King’s stories.
Personally, I see two links with Stephen King’s audiovisual corpus. Scary real-world folklore, and making one of the main settings of the story a religious environment.
I think Flanagan actually one-ups King due to Midnight Mass’ different approach. Creating a story true to the source material by going to the same sources as one of the originators of the vampire sub-genre of horror (Bram Stoker), instead of actually borrowing from him.
King stories like Needful Things, or The Tommyknockers usually deal with a large group of characters from a small town, experiencing a collective trauma. King doing vampire fiction (Salem’s Lot) is all right, but I think it may be too classic of an approach, due to Salem’s Lot being clearly informed by Bram Stoker.
In the case of Mike Flanagan taking inspiration from King, for Midnight Mass, I think it’s evident that it was more of a Storm of The Century case.
When it comes to using real-world folklore, I think King picked something big and verging on the generic, like El Cuco, and told the story of a man’s quest against it in The Outsider, while Flanagan did one or both of two things:
- Picked a monster from a very specific single legend from real-world monster lore, and made it epic by involving the whole town.
- Saw the lack of vampire tales drawing from real-world vampire folklore in audiovisual horror media, and synthesized the most sensational elements.
The Midnight Mass Stephen King influences, El Cuco (the Spanish-speaking world’s boogeyman) has a lot of different local versions (at least fifteen) while a story like Portugal’s Blood Gargoyle, which is the most similar example of a source for the series I could find, doesn’t have as many alternate regional variations.
Still, if you push the Blood Gargoyle legend outside the picture, you can easily find other sources of inspiration for Midnight Mass, like the Greek vrykolakas, Slavic upirs, and the Romanian strigoi.
Context of My two Watchings of this Horror Series
When it comes to vampires, the horror genre seems to draw inspiration too much from the Dracula brand of vampire and rather poorly from real-world vampire lore, like those three vampire species I named in the previous paragraph.
I think much of the charm of thid mini horror series is that it’s true to real-world vampire lore instead of borrowing from Bram Stoker and everything informed by him that came after him.
Real-world vampire lore is quite a deep rabbit hole.
All in all, the things I learned when studying vampire lore are generally repetitions of the same themes with regional variations.
Things like what creates vampires, their habits, how they are dealt with, and specific stories of cases of vampirism.
Midnight Mass goes to the source of vamp lore, as Stoker did with Dracula, to create a vampire’s yarn that isn’t indebted to Stoker in the least.
It may have a few scenes that pay homage to Dracula subtly, but the monster of the story is a very different kind of vampire.
Bram Stoker created a vampire that can transform into a bat, while stories of vampires with bat-like wings predate Dracula by hundreds of years.
But all this is just background context.
While I applaud the originality of the miniseries in its going to the vampire’s source, skipping a large portion of the conventional Draculian vampire tropes, the angle I want to explore in this article is not about that, but something that is very personal.
Like I already wrote, I think that studying esoteric and psychotic fringe theories, as a fan of horror media, creates the potential to amplify the shock felt and meaning gathered from some contemporary horror items.
I mean this for all sorts of horror items, even the ones like Midnight Mass, which on the surface may appear straightforward and not require any interpretation, or the search for a deeper meaning.
I watched Midnight Mass twice. Once when it was released, and recently once again. This time in an abridged form, a three-hour synopsis recommended by a chatbot.
In between these two watches of this horror series I read an obscure book.
The kind of book that I see as one of those extreme psychotic fringe books with the potential to sink you into a major depressive hole and/or cause you to experience a crisis of faith.
My Analysis of this Horror Series
When I watched this horror series for the first time I already had done some real-world vampire lore studies.
Nothing I read back then made me think of it as information someone could use to make a story about vampires fresher, more interesting, and devoid of cliches.
Midnight Mass proved me wrong, because just by taking a small detail (the fact that some of the Greek, slav, and Romanian vampires have bat-like wings) and giving a vampire’s story a style that makes it if not original, at the very list fresher than other vampire intellectual properties.
At that time I was not being my real self for a variety of reasons and, while I deeply enjoyed the miniseries, I didn’t have the energy or enthusiasm to think why I enjoyed it like I did.
I liked it a lot, and while I didn’t make any effort on that first watch to join the dots of what I already knew about vampire lore that was still unexploited by horror media.
Midnight Mass does a lot for the horror genre in refreshing the vampire tale for those superficially familiar with the subgenre.
It may be very positively received by those who have studied real-world vampire lore.
Also, it helped me return to a work that I had dismissed as a very one-sided view of astral cosmology, a book that made me go through an existential hard time when I read it.
My Very Personal Interpretation of Midnight Mass
The second time watching Midnight Mass it felt like a subtle reminder of one of those extreme psychotic fringe theories.
In my case, it was a theory (that some labeled an esoteric conspiracy theory) that may make you believe real-life ontologic horrors can be worse than the horrors in any piece of horror entertainment.
The book in question is one of those heavy new data packet downloads that can mess with your head if you aren’t prepared.
I already wrote about this topic, when I made my case on why learning esoteric and fringe things alongside watching a thing like The X-Files can maximize your entertainment experience.
Still, at the same time you need a support system in place be it social or philosophical, or even belief-based to help you not let the new outrageous information go to your head.
What Made Me See Midnight Mass Differently?
I’ll stop hitting around the bush right now and I will tell you the name of the book I read between my two times watching Midnight Mass.
It was War in Heaven by Kyle Griffith. Midnight Mass reminded me of that book a lot, the second time I watched it.
I read this book sometime during 2022 when researching the astral plane.
The book’s take on the afterlife was quite the blow below the belt and I felt it was a very noxious theory for someone like me. Someone who has spiritual and belief-system dimensions to one’s personality.
As I wrote elsewhere, I studied fringe knowledge in a hardcore way for at least seven years.
After that, this kind of reading preference became a different staple. Not a main subject of study like before, but they never went away from my life.
One of my conclusions after the first seven years of constant reading was that a lot of stuff about aliens and UFOs can fill you with existential despair, and ontologic dread. Adding a depressive side to one’s reality.
I also found that the same goes for any astral plane, and astral projection study worth its salt.
A common theme I found recurring among many authors of astral planes and astral projection books (that I already had seen in the alien and UFOs literary scene) was a generic bias towards an only monistic conception of the cosmos that disregards the bigger picture beyond the astral plane.
I don’t want to get technical here but to clarify, the modality I saw in books about the astral plane is to not consider existences and realms beyond the astral, like the mental and the causal, and if they happen to have to include a model of ultimate reality they default to a monistic view.
I had already read sad, and hard to deal with stuff, or otherwise disappointing stuff when I was reading all the classic astral projection books.
Still, War in Heaven can get much more worrying than the most disconcerting books, even for someone who thinks he has the afterlife already figured out.
The problem with Griffith’s theory is that while the scope of the book is gigantic and has some points for the development of hope, he focuses too much on the bad guys.
With a book like this, I think the worst-case scenario is a reader of the book without any faith-based system to his or her personality may become very impressed by the things in that book.
Not having anything with which to counteract the hopeless and wild statements in the book such a reader may subconsciously accept it as the only alternative of an afterlife.
I say worst-case scenario because adopting esoteric conspiracy theories as a belief system may make the person lose his or her soul years down the line when it’s time to leave the body.
In general, the book overloads your mind with a lot of esoteric stuff building you to the climax that is what Griffith calls his breakthrough.
The so-called breakthrough is just a sensationalist revelation, that I don’t see as a rule. Something I see as just one possibility of an afterlife experience among thousands of radically different ones.
In a nutshell, the message of the book is this: in the astral plane there are souls that don’t follow the soul’s life-death-bardo-reincarnation-birth cycle, they don’t want to reincarnate but stay in the astral plane, and they maintain their astral bodies by eating the souls of those with less power and knowledge.
They do this by creating environments that mimic the different creeds’ versions of heaven, to lure the unsuspecting, and spiritually underdeveloped souls.
Midnight Mass as an Astral Hell
Allegedly, there are planes of the astral plane that mimic the material world, or even that have this material world as their background.
I thought that a hellish existence like the events that transpire in Midnight Mass could be an expression of an astral hell that follows the Kyle Griffith template.
Nobody creates in a vacuum, and this series was made many years after War in Heaven was published. Every work is indirectly influenced by everything slightly related that came before.
Maybe my way of seeing the situation on the isle of Midnight Mass is one in thousands of interpretations. I know it’s far-fetched, I do.
The moments of chaos in the last episode, when they are turning each other in the church for me was like speaking the unspeakable with pictures.
I don’t know how the theocrats in the astral hell of Kyle Griffith actually do the deed. It’s something I don’t want to know, but that hard-to-watch part of the series makes a very fitting analogy.
It’s kind of a paradox that the series also includes some dialog that compensates for the bleakness of both the objective and subjective meanings of the series.
In the scene with the “what happens when you die” dialog, the explanation may be very beautiful, yes.
Still, it doesn’t give a concise, soothing explanation. It’s a personal take on a difficult question that people don’t like to ask.
Notwithstanding both Erin’s and Riley’s speeches also leaning towards the monistic, I think it’s a benign counterbalance anyway. At least it reminds the watcher that this is a question you should always strive to find answers to.
Midnight Mass’ Spiritual Subtext
Each person is at a different stage of spiritual development, and that is satisfactorily shown in the series.
After just one watch and an abridged watch, I’m not sure the beliefs of other characters are as exposed as those of Paul, Erin, and Riley.
Below is what I thought of each of their beliefs.
Erin’s View of the Afterlife (Theistic/Monistic)
Erin’s personal picture of what the afterlife would be like is a popular one, especially with those who went through a near-death experience.
It’s the reflections of a spirit that has recently left the body that contained it, especially the sentence about drifting through eternity in the arms of her loved ones.
It’s also unsettling because she believes in the (common) scenario where your loved ones (human and animal) that passed before you come to welcome you, an astral plane called The Rainbow Bridge if I’m not mistaken.
A scenario like that may, allegedly, be the theocrats of Griffith passing as your loved ones (not unlike the monster in the film No One Gets Out Alive) luring you to their astral hell.
Riley’s View of the Afterlife (Atheistic/Monistic)
Riley is an atheist. Riley exposes the most hopeless view of the afterlife, not believing that existence continues after leaving the body.
A very disadvantageous view to hold, since one goes to the afterlife completely unprepared and may end up becoming very easy prey for entities like Kyle Griffith’s theocrats.
Even if it was just to please his mother, and to accept that maybe after his life-changing tragedy he needs counseling from a spiritual leader, getting involved with Father Paul may be the wrong spiritual move.
If he had been a 100% atheist without any kind of religious conditioning (especially without recent impressions from that camp) he may have been saved by a type of monistic afterlife where his soul enters an impersonal state of rest merged into the unified field.
But the things he lived in his last days, and especially because they were in a religious environment interacting with a man of the cloth, may predispose him to enter precisely the dangerous realms of the lower astral plane where Griffith’s theocrats live.
Father’s Paul view of the Afterlife (Theistic)
Not taking into account any of the visual elements that fueled my new interpretation of Midnight Mass, Father Paul’s spiritual delusion is what made me see the series as a possible example of how afterlife existence in a Kyle Griffith astral hell would develop.
Like a spiritual vampirism social structure where a congregation is hoodwinked and thereafter exploited by those holding theocratic power.
If you pay attention to what the curette says, he has blind faith in the “angel”. Something I narrow down to simply a case of senility.
A vampire’s turning can bring your body back to youth, but your mind may continue rotting with aging-provoked diseases.
It’s a pity that Paul is a senile lost soul because you can’t deny how beautiful his articulate sermons are. Or how pious, charitable, and poetic his way of talking to his flock and to God is.
Conclusion
If one dedicates some time to learning about folkloric, fringe, and esoteric knowledge, the experience one has when enjoying determined items of horror media becomes enhanced.
To leave the viewer hanging only with vague expositions of spiritual alternatives, and evade touching any subject of God, creates existential dread and subtle psychic suffering.
It seems to me that, among the many objectives of horror art, causing this kind of hopelessness in the viewer makes a work of horror very good.
Even in my case, when I already dug deep into both esoteric and religious content, Midnight Mass provoked a pathos that I always appreciated in horror media.
One may argue that to create art that doesn’t give any comforting view of the afterlife is to be cruel to the viewer.
I would agree with that thought, despite being plain that to do otherwise would be a relatively bad style.
What else would you expect from a horror mini-series? For it to sit with you in a circle to sing Kumbaya, in the magic hour of The Rainbow Bridge?
One has to be thankful that such topics are touched at all, and horror I.P.s like Midnight Mass already do something, eliciting a curiosity or interest in the viewer for spiritual topics.
Image Credits: Netflix
© Bholenath Valsan 2025 — Midnight Mass (2021) Think Piece Horror Series
