Jamie and Chris catch the last ferry to The Crock Pot for an extended, episode by episode recap of Mike Flanagan’s big themed, warm hearted Netflix horror show, Midnight Mass. Meet Steve and find out what His Deal is, learn about the redemptive power of hats, and listen as we lengthily monologue on the efficacy of digging a hole in the face of certain death.
This is a show we both really loved, which is deeply spoilable, so we talk in spoiler free generalities first and then at 23:35 go buck wild and fling all such restraint into the fire. But if you’re even halfway interested in this show, def go and watch it first! It’s very good…
- Hill House, Bly Manor, Gerald’s Game are other Mike Flanagan things.
- The Turn of The Screw by Henry James and The Haunting Of Hill House are both incredible books, and foundational texts in a certain kind of rich, ambiguous, literary fiction flavoured horror.
- Six Feet Under and Twin Peaks The Return gave me chills which multiplied, somewhat.
- 23:35 – Spoiler Wall! Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
- Music: Raccoon City PD Entrance Hall Music from Resident Evil 2.
- Doom metal heroes Candlemass, are, it must be said, insanely camp.
- Legion is another show Noah Linklater is very good in.
- Manderlay or Dogville were those Lars Von Trier movies Jamie was trying to remember.
- Ricky Gervais and James Delingpole, what a shower of twatitude. The article Shall Not Be Linked, but is easy to find should you wish to subject yourself to some terrible journalism and superb self-owning.
- Sean Of The Dead: “we’re not using the Z word!”
- The movie I was trying to remember was Guillermo Del Toro’s superb directorial debut ‘Cronos’, which I’m confident Flanagan has seen and is likely quoting a bit here.
- True Detective series 3 really does have the greatest old age makeup I’ve even seen, used to extraordinary effect on the the already extraordinary face of Mahershala Ali
- Lord Of The Flies is a book you read in school by William Golding.
- Exterminate All The Brutes is brilliant, it’s on HBO Max in the US and NowTV in the UK, I can’t recommend it enough.
- “Nearer, My God, to Thee” is a 19th-century Christian hymn by Sarah Flower Adams, which retells the story of Jacob’s dream. “So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it…”
- It’s most famously the song played when the Titanic went down in the actual event, and to a lesser extent, the movie. Have you heard Gavin Briars beautiful ‘Sinking Of The Titanic’? It basically imagines what would have happened if the quartet kept playing even once they were swallowed up by the ocean, and transforms the strains of the hymn into spacious, ambient, haunting joys.
- From Hell and Alan Moore ripped off constantly by American showrunners. See the final scene of True Detective Series 1 for details.
- (also, read Alan Moore’s Top Ten, it’s amazing)
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Our intro music is by The Mandibles from their track Clambake. Many of the band members now tour as Count Bobo And The Bullion.
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