This year for Halloween, it wasn’t new horror movies that filled my docket, but rather repeat viewings. I’m not normally a re-watcher, what with all the fresh new content coming down the pipe. But both options I chose were super fun to revisit.
The first was the classic Shyamalan thriller Signs with my daughter. I have to say, 20+ years after release, that it doesn’t hold up near as well as I remember. It’s clunky in the plot while being strong in the characters. But she liked well enough.
The second option I watched by myself again was Midnight Mass, by Mike Flanagan. It’s a masterpiece that I couldn’t stop thinking about this year and was eager to re-watch. The acting is all superb and the pacing is brilliant, eerie and methodic.
It’s a deeply melancholy look at addiction, depression, family trauma, cult psychology, racism. But to be sure, it’s a hard-R horror series too. But those deeper human themes elevate the horror elements: they serve a purpose to the story and aren’t gratuitous.
There’s a final speech by a central character that is poetic and moving. I want to print it here, though it’s hidden for spoiler protection.
Myself. My self. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing. That word, “self.” Thats not the word. That’s not right, that isn’t…How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons. Little lightning bolts, like fireworks inside and I thought I’d despair or feel afraid, but I don’t feel any of that. None of it. Because I’m too busy. I’m too busy in the moment. Remembering. Of course. I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body is mostly empty space after all, and solid matter? It’s just energy vibrating very slowly why there is no me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I’m no longer breathing. And I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin. I remember I am energy. Not memory. Not self. My name, my personality, my choices, all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else is pictures, picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain. And I am the lightning that jumps between. I am the energy firing the neurons, and I’m returning. Just by remembering, I’m returning home. And it’s like a drop of water falling back into the ocean, of which it’s always been a part. All things… a part. You, me and my little girl, and my mother and my father, everyone’s who’s ever been, every plant, every animal, every atom, every start, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach. And that’s what we’re talking about when we say “God.” The cosmos and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It’s simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I’ll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams. But now, in this split-second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once. There is no time. There is no death. Life is a dream. It’s a wish. Made again and again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity. And I am all of it. I am everything. I am all. I am that I am.
I don’t read that as irreverent at all. I don’t read that as anti-religion. As a recent “convert” to mystical Christianity, that monologue is perhaps the most concise summary of a Progressive view of the afterlife. It’s both honoring to actual material physics and to the sum total of religious expression. The fact that this speech makes me emotional confirms for me all that I need to know.
That’s the strange thing about really well made art (even horror movies!). When they are this well crafted, with such attention to detail and care for their characters, they elevate the experience above the genre. I can’t recommend Midnight Mass enough.
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