Midnight Mass

[hammerofglass]

I'm almost a year late to the party but I finally saw this and it was really good. The whole gimmick where it's instantly obvious to the audience what kind of story it is (to the point that I don't think it counts as a spoiler) but somehow nobody in the show has ever heard of vampires works really well. I don't recall ever seeing that before; the genre-savvy character who already knows what a vampire is and how to fight them was already part of the formula in Carmilla and Dracula. Other than a tendency to monologue the characters are deep enough that I instantly connect them to people I know. As someone who grew up small-town Catholic it resonates enough that it's actually kind of uncomfortable, at least before the horror story stuff starts happening.

The main villain is the most loathsome despicable character I've seen in a long time. She's like if Miss Gulch and Kai Winn brought up a child together, but with a lot less scruples than either. The kind of villain who will do absolutely anything no matter how heinous because she honestly believes she's the good one by definition. She's not even supernaturally evil, she's just an asshole.

[CharlesPhipps]

It feels more Stephen King than most of the Stephen King adaptations out there.

I also give a kind of weird credit to the story that you have a man who believes turning everyone in his hometown into vampires is a godly act isn't the worst person in the story.