Midnight Mass Avoids The Worst Thing About Modern Vampire Shows

Midnight Mass Avoids The Worst Thing About Modern Vampire Shows

Midnight Mass interprets vampires in a way that’s both traditional and fresh, dodging the romantic tropes associated with modern vampires.

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Midnight Mass Avoids The Worst Thing About Modern Vampire Shows

Midnight Mass is a genre-bending horror-drama story that avoids the worst tropes associated with modern vampire shows. Instead of portraying the central bloodsuckers as cool and sexy and belittling the horror of vampirism, miniseries creator Mike Flanagan opts for the image of the vampire as a savage creature and its victims as legitimately threatening. The show manages to depict vampirism as a horrible curse without making its vampires seductively tortured souls, while still maintaining the basic lore.

Vampires arguably lost their edge around the end of the aughts, having become entangled in soapy antics that make it seem as if these creatures of the night are ironically stepping out of the shadows. The CW’s The Vampire Diaries, which debuted just a year after the first Twilight movie in 2009, was a teen romance series focusing on a human-vampire love triangle, and HBO’s True Blood created a world in which vampires literally “came out of the coffin” and uneasily try to co-exist with humankind. Relationship drama, themes of forbidden love, and lots of steamy scenes were all indicators that these types of television stories emphasized sensuality over savagery in vampire lore.

Midnight Mass, on the other hand, adheres more faithfully to traditional lore (for the most part) and captures the idea of the vampire as a violent, animalistic creature at the same time as it explores the enticing but dangerous temptations of the vampire curse. At the same time, the series subverts key associations with the myth, as the normally sacrilegious creature who’s traditionally disgusted by the image of a crucifix becomes devoutly Catholic. That means that celibacy sidelines all that sexiness that people associate with vampires, and the allure stems from religious devotees having a way to literally justify Biblical passages on eternal life.

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Despite these interpretations, all the other essential hallmarks of traditional vampire lore are present. Sunlight burns, the “turned” have a nearly insatiable and almost uncontrollable thirst for blood, and even though no one turns into a bat, “the Angel” monster certainly looks and flies like one. The idea of vampires being introduced to the larger world has horrifying consequences in Midnight Mass, too. Instead of merely creating dramatic friction between humans and vampires, introducing the two groups to each other becomes downright apocalyptic, as the references to the Book of Revelations makes clear.

That isn’t to say that Midnight Mass completely overlooks the tragic side of vampirism, either. There are infected people who can control their urges, but that doesn’t mean they get to happily enter a relationship with a loving human. When an infected Riley confronts his childhood sweetheart Erin with the news of the vampire blood pathogen, he only gets to briefly admit that he loves her before burning himself in the sunlight. Romance isn’t possible between the two groups here. The urge to kill is too strong, and the only way out is self-oblivion.

For all the deep, metaphorical layers that Midnight Mass introduces to the vampire myth, however, there’s still the image of a true predatory creature of the night in the form of the Angel. In this way, the series pays respects to a variety of different portrayals of vampires throughout the ages. There’s the beastly depiction, the more human-looking wolf in sheep’s clothing of Father Paul/Monsignor Pruitt and Bev Keane, and the tragically reluctant souls of Riley and his family. Midnight Mass shows how vampirism is truly a curse and drains all the beguiling sensuality out of the modern vampire, replacing it with terror and trauma.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/midnight-mass-avoid-worst-vampire-shows-mistake/

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