Mike Flanagan Sprinkled Midnight Mass Easter Eggs Throughout His Other Shows & Movies

While creating his Haunting anthology series for Netflix, Mike Flanagan turned to the bookshelf. The first season, The Haunting of Hill House, is loosely based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, while Season 2, The Haunting of Bly Manor, is an adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. But Flanagan’s latest horror series, Midnight Mass, is much more personal. It’s not based on a book but rather Flanagan’s own experiences.

To be clear, there is a book called Midnight Mass. Written by F. Paul Wilson, the 1990 action novel is full of vampires, cowboys, and vigilante nuns. But while it may share some surface similarities with Flanagan’s show, it has no relation to it at all. As Flanagan explained to Entertainment Weekly, the idea for Midnight Mass had been "bopping around" in his head for as long as he could recall. He wrote several different drafts of the story over the years, starting as far back as 2013. "It was a movie, it was a novel, it was a series,” he said. When he realized it was too long to be a film, Flanagan started shopping it around as a TV show, but “everyone passed.” Still, he “always thought of [it] as the best project I would never make.”

In the meantime, Flanagan buried references to Midnight Mass in his other works. In the 2016 film Hush — starring his wife Kate Siegel, who plays Erin in Midnight Mass — a deaf author faces off against a home invader while writing in a cabin in the woods. One scene shows the back of one of her novels, which say that her best-selling work is a book titled Midnight Mass. The title pops up again in Flanagan’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald's Game. When main character Jessie needs to scare off a dog, she grabs a copy of Midnight Mass from her bedside table.

Now, Midnight Mass finally gets to exist on its own terms. "I don't know how long I could have gone without writing it," Flanagan told EW. "There's a very natural thing that happens where, if you're writing anything that tiptoes into a personal place, you find yourself vomiting up all sorts of things into it. It's happened to me with Hill House in a pretty big way. It happened with [The Haunting of Bly Manor]. This one, though, was the story I always wanted to tell."

At the core of the show is Zach Gilford’s Riley, a man struggling to come to terms with his past alcohol misuse and behavior. Flanagan, who is three years sober, told EW that it’s good that it took until now for Midnight Mass to get picked up. Had it been greenlit before 2014, he doesn’t think he could have “[written] about sobriety, not intelligently.” Now Flanagan speaks through Riley, who goes on his own wild journey of sobriety, faith, and acceptance. As Flanagan said, “It's by far the most personal thing I've ever been lucky enough to work on.”