Hello everyone and welcome back to the blog! I’ve been recently going on a Mike Flanagan Netflix binge and was brought back to one of my favorite works of his titled Midnight Mass. Midnight Mass is a horror series about a small fishing island that gets stranger with each passing day after a new priest arrives. The show has a couple of obvious antagonists, but there is one that develops over the course of the show that might fall under the radar due to horror tropes: Beverly Keane. Her character role as an unassuming and often rude religious white woman is largely unassuming until the very end of the show where she becomes the main villain of the island. Despite this, she suffers from a very similar framework of being tied solely to a religious view that the rest of the characters operate on, which actually makes her flat character function differently than we would expect. This character analysis will spoil the entirety of Midnight Mass.
Beverly Keane plays a very singular role very well, which I found initially confusing given how Mike Flanagin characters are usually written. Midnight Mass, despite its many monologues that often spill on for minutes at a time, doesn’t give its audience too much insight on the characters we know. We get exposition, how characters ground themselves in religion, their history with one another, but everyone’s ‘essence’ can be easily reduced down to a stance on religion and how it functions in a modern context. For example, Riley (the main character that the show begins with) is a recovering alcoholic who returns to the island after he kills someone in a drunk driving accident. Because of this, Riley abandons Christianity despite being an altar boy when he was younger. As far as the show is concerned, Riley’s entire character is now based around him being agnostic. If this seems reductive, it’s because it is. Every character within Midnight Mass operates on this method of archetyping characters.
Although characters are archetypes, Beverly Keane manages to escape her expectations of being a flat character by doubling down on her archetype. In the beginning of the show, we can see that she is judgmental towards other characters in a myriad of ways, one of which being that she stands in front of the church and makes subtle remarks about how often people come to mass on the weekdays and including the bible into the school curriculum on the island (where she also works as a teacher.) Although it starts small, it very quickly escalates into her poisoning dogs that she finds scary and covering up the crimes of the new priest in town, who is secretly killing island residents and drinking their blood. Keane is also incredibly racist to the island’s new sheriff Hassan because he is Muslim, further cementing this ‘holier than thou’ Christian archetype that Flanagan seems to be going for. She has fully committed to being ‘the bad guy’ by the midpoint of the show even though the priest is the one who has a more forwardly antagonistic goal of turning everyone into “angels” by feeding them vampire blood through communion at mass without anyone knowing.
Even though the priest (Father Paul Hill, played by Hamish Linklater) wants to grant the island immortality by what he thinks is God’s will, Beverly Keane manages to be the puritanical judgment that enacts the horrors we see during the finale of the show. At an Easter midnight mass, Father Hill convinces nearly half of the churchgoers to commit suicide in order to be reborn into what is essentially a vampire. While some people escape from the church, Beverly Keane goes on a murder spree, specifically targeting those who either didn’t go to church or disagreed with her evangelism before the events of the show. Even Father Hill disapproves of her methods because this turning was supposed to be guided and enlightening, but she took matters into her own hands and started burning down homes so that survivors wouldn’t be able to hide from those who turned. While Father Hill gets momentary redemption for feeling regret about what he has done to the island and general well-meaning manner, Keane doubles down in a way that feels unexpected from the show. Given that she isn’t even the main antagonist (it would be insane to have her be the main antagonist while a giant evil vampire with wings roamed the island at night), it seems bold to have a character be so consistently evil throughout an entire season of a show with no redeemable aspects.
This again plays into what feels like a very political view of Catholicism considering that many, if not all of the characters, have some sort of stance with or against the church that feel like stereotypes. Beverly Keane represents those who can justify their evil through their religion by various means, most notably by having a quote from the bible at the ready for every situation regardless of where their actions fall on their moral compass. Father Hill radicalizes the townsfolk but had good intentions because he thought he was doing a God’s work, Riley Flynn despises the church because it shunned him after he went to jail, Erin Greene believes the church has good intentions but doesn’t really interact with it, and so on. While there is plenty of dialogue around these characters, they hardly have any characterization outside of these viewpoints because their conversations aren’t spent developing their stance on the church. By giving Beverly Keane no way out of her wrongdoings, it almost serves as a very specific jab at those who refuse to back down on their beliefs regardless of how bigotry-fueled they are. At the end of the show, after all of Beverly Keane’s hard work of disabling boats that leave the island and burning down everyone’s homes is undone by our last few surviving characters, there is nowhere left for the vampire citizens of the tiny island to hide. The show ends a minute or two after where we watch her dig in the sand on the beach and weep as the sun washes over her, burning her alive.
While I considered covering other works of Mike Flanagan (namely Haunting of Hill House), I think I gravitated towards Midnight Mass because the complexity of the characters lies in their beliefs and how they interact with each other, which I find very interesting. To have the bulk of the story rest on something that is just outside the setting and the characters can be difficult, especially considering how well Mike Flanagan can write characters if he wants to (Haunting of Hill House). Part of me thinks that while the characters didn’t have a ton of personality to them outside of their beliefs, the acting made up for it. Hamish Linklater is fantastic in this series as an evil priest who shipped a vampire overseas in a trunk. Although I haven’t seen him in any other works, I’ll be sure to look out for him. Hopefully I’ll have less horror content to write about in the future. See you then!
Harper Saglier – Blog Editor
Harper Saglier – Blog Editor, Prose Editor & Layout Editor : Harper is a junior at Lewis University majoring in English with a concentration in Writing. They are currently employed at the Howard and Lois Adelmann Regional History Collection. When they aren’t reading academic material, they enjoy watching movies and reading books from their endless growing backlog of recommendations. They hope to use the analysis and writing skills gained from Lewis to further drive their interest in literature beyond graduation. Some of their favorite authors include Neil Gaiman and Oscar Wilde.