- I think the two biggest influences on Midnight Mass,
that I can think of,
are both out of Stephen King's universe.
- I'm Trevor Macy and this is Mike Flanagan.
Our Midnight Mass is currently streaming on Netflix,
and this is going to be laden with spoilers.
(spooky suspenseful music)
- Salem's Lot is a story about a small New England town
that is infiltrated by a vampire,
and it was King's riff on Dracula.
And the entire ensemble is kind of systematically converted
until the town has been turned against itself,
and you're watching the destruction of a community.
Storm of the Century is also worth mentioning
because it features an isolated island community,
and this tiny community braces
for this once-in-a-century storm.
And with the storm comes a stranger,
who immediately starts to disrupt everything.
At the center of that is the sheriff of the island,
who is not only the moral center of that community,
but is also tasked with having to deal with this newcomer.
And now that I'm saying it out loud, boy,
there's some Needful Things in here too.
(Trevor laughs)
So yeah, it's all Stephen King, all the time.
Bev Keane is the monster of Midnight Mass.
For all the other monsters at play,
she's the one I think is the scariest.
In a lot of ways,
she's a very similar character to Mrs. Carmody in The Mist,
who I think is a phenomenal King antagonist.
- We are being punished for what?
For going against the will of God.
- The thing about Bev Keane though,
is she's also drawn a lot out of real life right now.
Bev Keane is Karen.
(dog barks)
- Snapped at me! Snapped right at me!
- But I think even before that, everybody knew a Bev Keane.
- Yeah.
The sad part is that Samantha Sloyan, who plays Bev Keane,
is, like, the nicest person in the world.
And forever, I feel like she's gonna walk down the street
and people are going to be like ugh.
- Or Beverly fucking Keane's queen evil bitchin', poor him.
- I think we'll have to just issue a continual apology
to her for getting pushed off the sidewalk
for the rest of her life.
- Do not cherry pick the glories of God!
- I was raised Catholic.
So the Catholic iconography is very much kind of woven
into my DNA.
And how I first saw the horror genre
because the scariest examples of horror
that I can recall experiencing first in my life,
I found in the Bible,
where you have rivers of blood,
and angels coming to the door to slaughter children,
and pillars of fire, and all sorts of horrors
that are just baked into the Bible itself.
As a young Catholic,
that was incredibly impactful on me.
I think Midnight Mass is not a vampire story
in the traditional sense because the vampire in our story
is really representing fanaticism and fundamentalism.
We didn't use the word "vampire"
because the minute you do, the minute you say that,
it changes the story into a vampire story.
The word "vampire" carries
with it hundreds of years of horror fiction
and tropes and expectations.
- Not everybody has the same idea of what that means,
but what no one has in their heads,
if you just use that word,
is the totality of how that mythology
is used in Midnight Mass.
- And I think we were way more interested
in a modern parable about faith
and about the corruption that fundamentalism
and fanaticism can have on any belief system,
outside of religion.
Horror deals with monsters,
and the monsters that are the most entertaining
are the vampires and the werewolves and the zombies.
There are these other entities that infiltrate our world
and how we brave humans fight them is one of the staples
of the genre.
The zealotry on display in Midnight Mass
is particularly interesting to me
because while we have a vampire
who infiltrates this community,
the vampire isn't the thing that tears this community apart.
The community is... It's the people
who suddenly find their belief systems validated.
That kind of fanaticism and fundamentalism represents,
I think, the potential for how monstrous we can be
to each other.
The only thing that stops us
from treating each other that way
and inflicting these horrors on each other is an ability
to empathize.
Once that's taken away,
that's what frees human beings
to commit unspeakable acts against each other.
And that, I think, is the scariest horror
that I can imagine.
Midnight Mass has been the most personal story
that I've ever gotten to tell.
And it's been that way for me for many years at this point.
The story that has given me a chance to explore issues
with my existence, my sobriety, my faith.
The fact that it resonated with my other collaborators,
that it resonated with Trevor on just as personal level,
with our other writers, with our cast.
There's something about wondering what it means
to be alive on this world and what happens after we die
that is universal.
These questions unite people.
- The body stops a cell at a time,
but the brain keeps firing those neurons.
- Even though the answers to these questions divide people.
- I strongly suspect that the audience
will make it theirs in the same way that I did
and our cast did and our other writers did.
You know, even though it is Mike's most personal work.
- Thanks for watching Netflix Geeked.
Midnight Mass is now streaming on Netflix.