Except then Mike Flanagan and the cast of MIDNIGHT MASS did. How is that even possible? I'm honestly still wondering. And the fact that show dropped all at once, so viewers could literally go from the darkest of dark nights to a true and blessed resurrection in the course of just a couple hours and still not find it false in any way, only increases the challenge in doing so.
Beyond all that, my own instinct watching was that the ending would be a more straightforward horror story, with the few survivors either trying to escape or trying to somehow kill 100 vampire Catholics before they could kill them and escape the island. Because that what third acts of horror stories are, right? They're the Chase and the Fight to Survive/Win and Final Girls.
And honestly, the end result plotwise probably would have been the same as what we got: the two kids getting away while everyone else dies with the sun.
What differentiates Flanagan's story is that he keeps the camera firmly focused on the journeys of the characters--and especially not "our heroes", who really do undertake a pretty traditional version of the horror third act--but our "villains", the Vampire Catholics. In a way the end of 106 is actually head fake, insofar as it seems like becoming the undead has turned them all into mindless eating machines. But then over the course of 107 we see them slowly slowly returning to themselves--which in a sense was set up in from the very start, with Fr. Paul, who is anything but a mindless beast.
That journey of those characters from transformation to confronting the monstrosity within them is central to the themes of the series. It's the reason the series opens on Riley killing the woman rather than Fr. Paul coming to town, and also it lies at the heart of their conflict with each other, though we don't know that right away. The ending is a way of saying, Riley is not the exception, Fr. Paul is not the exception, we're all the same. And in facing not only our own capacity for the atrocious but our actual harm-filled deeds and making new choices we find a path to redemption.
But it's also a choice borne of letting story emerge from character desires and choices, rather than being a thing that happens to characters. And that can be harder a lot harder commitment to keep to in any kind of action films, particularly horror films where the lure of the insane visual and scare jumps and masked mystery villains is just so strong. In fact I'd bet if you go back to just about any horror movie that disappointed you, on some level the problem is going to be that the action overwhelmed the characters, or just very straightforwardly ignored the villains as real characters at all.
For me the great lesson of Flanagan's writing is this: Everyone in a horror movie is on a personal journey, and that journey is not just about survival--or it shouldn't be anyway. And remembering that is the difference between a possibly really great scarefest and a story that rips your fucking heart out and makes you see things differently.
I got a little behind this week, but I've got plenty more to say about MIDNIGHT MASS! I'll be posting again tomorrow and Saturday. See you then.
