This weekend I watched MIDNIGHT MASS. If you'd like to see how it affected me IRL, I did a tweet thread as the show basically ripped me apart. Suffice to say, I found it really challenging at times and really brilliant. There are so many things Mike Flanagan and his fellow writers do that just should not work and does. It's basically one long series of magic tricks, and so in this week of Halloween, oh hell yeah we are going to dig into it.
I'm absolutely going to spoil the series, starting in about one sentence, so if you haven't watched it, you might tread carefully. It's not a show you want to ruin for yourself, in my experience.
Okay here we go:
So the premise of MIDNIGHT MASS is basically that an old priest is willingly sired by a vampire, comes back to his community as a new, young man and secretly starts feeding everyone vampire blood during communion in order to heal and renew them as he has.
Which is enormously messed up. Like, I've seen pretty normal Catholics worried that they're committing a sin by watching the series. And the reason is, the Eucharist--aka the consecrated bread and wine that Catholics consume during their services--is pretty much the most holy of holies. You do not #!#%! with the Eucharist, in any way. It is the one thing that is held as absolutely sacred. So to have someone substituting in this profoundly disgusting thing, and then on top of it arguing that it's only with that blood that it actually becomes what Jesus said it was supposed to be--it's just really really fucked up.
And if that's not "bad" enough, the series culminates with an Easter Vigil--the day that Christians celebrate Jesus rising from the dead, again, one if not the most important celebration in the church--during which most of the Catholics in town commit mass suicide in the church, then rise as vampires and murder everyone else there. I don't know, that ending of 106 may be the most horrifying thing I've ever seen in a TV show. It's just profoundly upsetting and uncomfortable.
I'd say 99% of writers would NEVER go near any of that stuff, exactly because it is so sacrosanct, either for them or for others. But Flanagan does, and in a way that clearly understands the taboo and wrestles with it. And it just leads to incredibly thoughtful and provocative writing.
As far as I'm concerned one of the best pieces of advice about writing is to go to the places that make you uncomfortable. The places where you or others are uncomfortable or afraid are almost certainly some important places in your life. And so what you'll have to say will likely be a lot more meaningful, and not just to you. (There's that strange paradox--the more specifically you write about your own experience, the more relevant it becomes to other people.)
This is easier said than done. Even just considering what are the things that I'm afraid of or uncomfortable about can be hard--denial ain't just a river.
One thing that I find can help is to Keep a running note on my phone listing moments that I feel uncomfortable. Like a running tally of nightmares--good times, clearly. :) But it's the kind of thing that can help you get in touch with where those uncomfortable or scary places are, and generate some new ideas.
If you take nothing else from MIDNIGHT MASS, Be Brave. Walk into the Terror.
