Tonight’s the big night. It is the Easter vigil, it’s midnight Mass—the midnight Mass. (The titular Midnight Mass, if you will.) Father Paul Hill will reveal himself to be Monsignor John Pruitt, reborn as his younger self thanks to the blood of the angel. He’ll distribute poison to the congregation, so that they too may die and rise again. He’ll even show them the angel itself, spreading its wings in all its glory.
Of course, not everyone’s down with this plan.
Utter chaos follows. An orgy of death and violence breaks out in the church, as people poison themselves and die vomiting blood, then rise up to kill and consume the few who resisted this miniature, supernatural Jonestown. Director and cowriter Mike Flanagan lingers on this for a long, long time—echoing the way he shot a candlelit procession of singing congregants for over three minutes, long enough for them to sing an entire hymn—and the effect is profoundly disturbing, a genuine violation of cultural taboo. It’s like watching someone lance a boil from which all the evil done in God’s name bursts out like pus.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Beverly Keane, not Monsignor John, winds up being the ringleader of this new coven of vampires. While he continues to lie supine on the floor, recovering from Millie’s gunshot, Bev overrides his command to keep the church doors shut—so that the newly reborn can receive guidance instead of instigating a slaughter, which, too late—and has Sturge throw them wide open to end the episode. She has the death of unbelievers on her mind, and plenty of targets to choose from: Annie and Warren Flynn, Sarah Gunning, Leeza Scarborough, Erin Greene, Sheriff Hassan, and any other poor souls who didn’t count themselves as part of the flock at St. Patrick’s.
As for the other characters you may know, Sturge and the mayor and the mayor’s wife have all gone full vampire. So have Ooker and (painfully, over his father screams) Ali. Henry Flynn tried to escape but was overwhelmed by the undead. Mildred Gunning was immediately attacked by the angel after headshotting the Monsignor; her present whereabouts and status are unknown.
All this carnage came at the end of a very deliberately plotted and paced episode, in which the doors of escape for our characters are shut down one by one. Riley left suicide notes for his parents and brother—and for Pruitt, a warning rather than a farewell. But the notes left them with more questions than answers, at least until the massacre at the church answered all questions for them.
Erin’s first trip upon returning to the island is to Dr. Gunning, the only person she feels will listen to her. She’s more right than she knew: Gunning, of course, has noted the phenomenon of recent blood samples catching fire in the sunlight, so the idea that Riley burst into flames at dawn makes some sort of scientific sense to her.
But when she goes to Sheriff Hassan and asks him to investigate the church on the suspicion that they’ve been dosing everyone with this…contagion, he balks. He joined the NYPD after 9/11 to help serve and protect his country, only to find himself and his fellow Muslim officers, many of them rapidly promoted due to their linguistic and cultural knowledge, under suspicion as double agents. He moved to Crockett Island to get him and his son away from all that. Why invite another inquisition? (It winds up being a moot point by the end, of course.)
So the doctor and her mother and Erin try to make it off the island, only to find that the mayor has called off the ferries for “repairs,” and that Sturge is similarly “tuning up” every fishing boat he can board. Then the power goes out. Then, during the procession, the cellphone tower is shut down.
There’s nowhere to go but the church.
So there’s a horrible, inexorable storytelling logic to this episode, one that starts calm, grows tense, and ends in a spectacular, cacophonous display of soul-curdling violence. As horror goes, it’s Midnight Mass‘s strongest and scariest episode, a real breakthrough for a show primarily driven by dialogue and atmosphere until this point. The metaphor for how religious faith can prey on the vulnerable and convert people to fanatics is, in a sense, baptized in blood in this installment, emerging in full, its horrible wings spread at last. And the finale awaits.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
Watch Midnight Mass Episode 6 on Netflix