Why “Midnight Mass” is the Perfect Parable for Our Times

Netflix’s Hit Series Succeeds as both Allegory and Antidote

“Midnight Mass,” directed by Mike Flanagan and currently streaming on Netflix, takes the vampire genre and subverts it in a way that raises profound questions about our society and its values. As many reviewers have already noted, the series is an extended meditation on faith, but it couldn’t succeed in that regard without juxtaposing faith with its evil twin, idolatry, and asking us whether we can really tell the two apart.

Plot (ALERT: Spoilers ahead!)

When “Midnight Mass” opens, Riley Flynn is returning to his childhood home on Crockett Island after serving four years in prison for vehicular manslaughter. Penniless, living at his parents’ home, and working for his father on the family’s fishing boat, Riley clearly feels his life has hit a dead end.

Much the same could be said for Crockett Island itself. Once home to a prosperous fishing industry, an oil spill has devastated fishing stocks, and now this sleepy town of 127 souls, like so many other blue collar, rural communities in America, seems to be in terminal decline. The only thing really holding the town together is its Catholic church, St. Patrick’s, headed by the beloved but elderly Monseigneur Pruitt.

Pruitt has been away on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but is due back any day. Around the time that Riley returns, a young priest named…