Stephen King Meets Lost In Netflix's Near-Perfect 7-Part Horror Series
Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.
While Netflix’s mix of Lost and Stephen King only lasted a mere seven episodes, that was all that Mike Flanagan’s supernatural horror show needed to tell one of the genre’s most unforgettable stories. Since the beginning of Rod Serling’s seminal anthology series The Twilight Zone, horror has always been a major TV genre. Although cop shows, sitcoms, and now superhero series tend to dominate the ratings, horror has been part of every age in TV’s evolution as a medium.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, horror anthology shows were instrumental in pushing the boundaries of TV censorship. In the ‘90s, long before prestige TV shows like Band of Brothers, Sex in the City, The Sopranos, and The Wire, HBO’s Tales from the Crypt became one of the first TV shows to frequently feature explicit violence, nudity, and swearing. Even more recently, the daring shocks of The Walking Dead and American Horror Story paved the way for non-horror shows like Game of Thrones and The Boys to portray almost anything onscreen.
While few horror shows can outdo Shudder’s anthology Slasher when it comes to sheer jaw-dropping trauma, one of the genre’s leading lights takes a subtler, more character-driven approach to the genre. Heavily influenced by his frequent collaborator Stephen King, writer/ director Mike Flanagan has emerged as one of the pioneering talents in horror TV since 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House. His Netflix series Midnight Mass shows why, offering viewers a scarier, more satisfying spin on Lost’s island-set mystery story.
Midnight Mass Combines Lost’s Isolated Setting With Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot
2021’s Midnight Mass arrived at an interesting time for Flanagan, and the horror genre at large. While his early movies, Oculus and Hush, made the director one to watch in horror fan circles, he gained new levels of mainstream acclaim with the one-two punch of 2017’s Gerald’s Game and 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House. The former was an adaptation of King’s novel of the same name, an infamously grisly story that was long considered impossible to adapt.
Gerald’s Game focuses on a woman who becomes trapped under her husband’s body after he handcuffs her to a bed in an isolated woodland cabin before suffering a fatal heart attack. As such, almost the entire book takes place in the heroine’s head as she slowly perishes alone, a premise that makes for an appropriately horrifying read but a pretty dull watch.
Aided by Carla Gugino’s fearless, virtuoso lead performance, Flanagan pulled out all the stops to ensure Gerald’s Game was never boring. This earned the movie stellar reviews, but the director and his leading lady outdid themselves the following year when 2018’s loose Shirley Jackson adaptation The Haunting of Hill House arrived on Netflix. A sprawling multi-generational epic about grief, madness, and family, the miniseries was lauded as one of the greatest horror shows ever upon release.
Almost inevitably, the second outing in Flanagan’s The Haunting of franchise, The Haunting of Bly Manor, struggled to replicate The Haunting of Hill House’s rapturous reception. To make matters worse, Flanagan’s highly hyped, expensive sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, was met with mixed reviews upon its release in late 2019 and proved a box office disappointment. While Midnight Mass wasn’t a last-gasp effort for the writer/director, it did need to be a critical comeback.
Fortunately for Flanagan, the self-contained miniseries was deservedly met with critical acclaim upon its September 2021 release. Flanagan’s Midnight Mass took the supernatural island setting of Lost and used it to add an element of remoteness, and subsequent urgency, that was missing in King’s iconic vampire novel Salem’s Lot, where the characters really could just leave the titular town if they wanted.
Midnight Mass Borrows From Many Stephen King Stories
However, while Lost was byzantine and dizzyingly complex thanks to its flashbacks, flash forwards, and flash sideways, Midnight Mass was both impressively thoughtful and mercifully straightforward. The show’s main characters meditated on faith, free will, community, groupthink, zealotry, and guilt in lengthy monologues, but the slow burn supernatural horror story ensured that none of this philosophical pondering ever felt navel-gazing or aimless.
Furthermore, in a move that made Flanagan’s future planned King adaptations all the more exciting, the writer/director blended elements from various stories by the legendary horror master. This makes Midnight Mass both a perfect King homage and a wholly original story, since it doesn’t borrow from one famous King book so much as ten of them mashed together.
Small town vampire horror? Salem’s Lot. Island community cut off from the world and facing a supernatural threat? Storm of the Century. Charismatic preacher with seemingly paranormal powers whose promises to a small-town community seem like they are too good to be true? Revival. Siege horror with a vicious religious zealot as its human villain? The Mist, which Flanagan is set to directly remake soon.
Midnight Mass Has One Thing Lost Was Missing
The hoary old maxim claims that “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” but there’s some truth to this cliché when it comes to Midnight Mass. On paper, the show sounds like it is assembled from parts borrowed from half a dozen King books and Lost, but in practice, the unique characters of Midnight Mass, its genuinely unpredictable plot, and the show’s unforgettable conclusion combine to create a wholly original viewing experience.
This is also, sadly, where the show outdoes one of its biggest inspirations. For its first few episodes, Midnight Mass has a lot in common with Lost, as someone or something on this isolated island is messing with time, and the community’s members are stuck on the remote outpost without any ability to contact the wider world due to shadowy, unseen outside forces.
However, as Midnight Mass reveals itself to be a recognizable, if admittedly far-fetched, supernatural horror story, the show manages to outdo even Lost’s best episodes with an ending that offers a satisfying conclusion to its self-contained story. Lost’s blend of character drama, sci-fi, mystery, horror, and fantasy was thrilling, but ultimately, the Mystery Box show’s genre mélange led to a plot that lost its logical through line. In contrast, while Midnight Mass owed a creative debt to both Stephen King’s books and Lost, the Netflix horror also boasted a more satisfying ending than either.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.