Is Netflix’s ‘Midnight Mass’ Secretly Mike Flanagan’s Next ‘Haunting’?

With the success of his 2019 Stephen King-adjacent horror hit Doctor Sleep and spine-tingling turns toward heady supernatural drama with two Netflix series, 2018’s Haunting of Hill House and its follow-up, 2020’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, Mike Flanagan has quickly become the kind of filmmaker whose name comes regularly attached to the descriptive phrase “…from the mind of.” Fans just love Flanagan’s cerebral take on the business of scares.

But his next project, Midnight Mass, is causing some confusion thanks to a cryptic tweet that dropped last night (August 5) potentially teasing the project… From the @haunting Twitter handle. So what’s the deal? Was Netflix teasing Midnight Mass? And is Midnight Mass secretly the third Haunting series? Let’s discuss.

Flanagan, like Quentin Tarantino, one of his many professional admirers, is known to bake in connectivity between his projects. From utilizing the same actors — frequent Flanagan collaborator Kate Siegel is one example; she also happens to be his wife — to interweaving thematic elements and utilizing an anthology format, the celebrated filmmaker is well on his way to constructing a “Flanagan-o-verse.” And it’s that connectivity that’s lately perked the ears of the “Fanagans,” because his new project for Netflix, Midnight Mass, feels to many observers like it could be the third installment in his Haunting series.

“We’re 30 miles from the mainland, with only two ferries a day,” reads a cryptic tweet from the Haunting of Bly Manor account, and in the attached clip, a foghorn blares as a vessel pushes through choppy, murky seas. People on the Internet predictably lost their minds, lending the tweet and footage all kinds of significance, and Flanagan himself chimed in, tweeting “No plans for a new HAUNTING series…”

…but damn, that ellipsis is doing a lot of work! There’s little hard intel on Midnight Mass, but it’s described as a limited series concerning the supernatural events that occur on an isolated island when a charismatic young priest joins the community. And sure, it could very well be a scare-a-thon all by its lonesome. But fans are gonna fan, right? And with usual Flanagan-o-verse players attached including Siegel and Henry Thomas, the mystery surrounding the development of Midnight Mass is feeding into the allure that hovers around the filmmaker’s projects like thick fog wreathing a creepy mansion.