Based entirely on a track record that saw him deliver nothing but consistent critical and viewership success to the platform through Gerald’s Game, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club, you might have thought Netflix gave Mike Flanagan the creative freedom to do whatever he wanted without impunity before he jumped ship for Prime Video.
As it turns out, that was nowhere near being the case, and the filmmaker was not best pleased with just how often the streaming service decided to try and imprint his atmospheric, intense, and isolated tale of rural vampirism with the grubby fingerprints of heavy-handed interference.
In fact, there was one moment in particular that Flanagan described as “the stupidest scene I’ve ever filmed” during a thread on BlueSky, and yet it still managed to make the final cut despite his protestations.
“They put enormous pressure on us to ‘add scares’ to the pilot of Midnight Mass. One scene they insisted on doing as additional photography was to help ‘explain what happened to the cats.’ They pitched a scene where we see the “angel” stalking and killing a stray cat. I HATED it. They dug in, though: ‘if we don’t see this, no one will understand what happened to the cats, and this will add a huge scare to the pilot.’
I protested and protested and protested but ultimately we lost the battle. So there is this scene in the first episode where we follow a cat, who just walks around, and then there’s a POV shot through the bushes, and then it gets grabbed out of frame. It’s like a feline Friday the 13th scene. It remains the stupidest scene I’ve ever filmed.”
There you have it; if you ever rewatch Midnight Mass and find yourself wondering why the scene in question feels so out of place, it’s because Flanagan never wanted to shoot it in the first place.
