Gothic Catholicism in Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass: Interplay among Vampirism, the Eucharist, and Ritual

This paper proposes “Gothic Catholicism” as an interpretive framework to read Mike Flanagan’s mini-series Midnight Mass (2021), examining how the series incorporates religious language, Catholic ritual, and material objects and culture into Gothic forms and aesthetics that are at once consoling and terrifying. The study combines Gothic criticism, television and film aesthetics, and post-secular theory to illustrate chiaroscuro lighting, cinematography, long takes, and ritual choreography to transform church architecture, confession, and the Eucharist into symbols of transgression. With a close reading of the series and its frameworks, the paper intends to study how the Eucharist is reframed as a vampiric vector, Gothic revelation through confessional intimacy, and the church as an instrument and a sanctuary of collective unmaking. This paper engages with these strategies in discussions about religious materiality and on-screen ritual, using the works of Botting, Punter, McDannell, Krzywinska, Carroll, and Taylor to demonstrate the relationship between classical Gothic tropes and contemporary visual horror. The series’ ambivalence toward belief is highlighted through a post-secular lens. It presents an uneasy coexistence of miracle and consolation with apocalypse and fanaticism, producing aesthetic and ethical tensions. The paper calls for a Gothic analysis of the miniseries to evaluate Flanagan’s contribution to contemporary Gothic media.