Mike Flanagan’s 7-Part Netflix Vampire Horror Is Getting A Perfect Follow-Up In 7 Weeks

While Midnight Mass might be Mike Flanagan’s greatest Netflix show ever, the seemingly unsurpassable horror miniseries is getting an ideal follow-up in October 2026. There are few horror TV runs as legendary as Mike Flanagan’s partnership with Netflix from the late 2010s until the early 2020s. To be fair, the filmmaker’s plans to remake Stephen King’s The Mist, the author’s debut novel Carrie as a miniseries, and The Dark Tower saga as a Prime Video show could soon prove just as creatively fruitful.

However, Flanagan’s two-show The Haunting of franchise alone was a masterpiece, to say nothing of the three other superb shows the writer/director created for the streaming service between 2018 and 2023. Starting unbelievably strong with 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House, a loose adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s horror novel of the same name, Flanagan soon moved on to 2020’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, an equally ambitious reimagining of Henry James’ supernatural novella The Turn of the Screw.

Before the underrated Netflix YA horror series The Midnight Club completely changed things with a much more youth-oriented show, 2021’s Midnight Mass stood out as the first entirely original title among Flanagan’s Netflix shows. Both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor had played fast and loose with their literary inspirations, diverging far from the original stories of both books, but Midnight Mass was a true original and a critical triumph. Now, Netflix’s upcoming horror miniseries Below looks like its ideal follow-up five years later.

Below Is The Perfect Replacement For Midnight Mass

Set on the sparsely populated Crockett Island, Midnight Mass saw the community begin to inexplicably change after the arrival of a mysterious new priest, Hamish Linklater’s Father Hill, and the return of a disgraced stockbroker, Riley Flynn, after serving a prison sentence for drunk driving. An ensemble-cast horror set on an isolated island with a tight-knit community besieged by some sort of supernatural monster, Midnight Mass was a critical triumph upon release.

Now, the upcoming Josh Hartnett vehicle Below sounds like an ideal follow-up. Also starring Stranger Things season 1’s breakout star Charlie Heaton, Below sees the denizens of a remote town in Newfoundland besieged by a mysterious monster from the sea. The community’s handful of residents, including Hartnett’s fisherman Calvin Penney, his son Wade, and Mackenzie Davis’s visiting researcher Fonda, must band together to stop whatever is hunting the townspeople while trying to preserve the small fishing village’s community.

Both shows are set in isolated, remote fishing communities with tight-knit bonds, and both see their respective towns thrown into disarray when a paranormal threat from outside enters their hometown unexpectedly. Thus, Below sounds like an ideal follow-up to Midnight Mass, especially when Midnight Mass’s big twist proved that the show was not the Jaws pastiche viewers may have been expecting from its island setting.

Below Has One Thing All of Mike Flanagan’s Netflix Shows Were Missing

Spoilers follow for the five-year-old series, which is well worth watching first for the uninitiated. Although it takes a while for viewers to work out exactly what type of horror show Midnight Mass is, the show eventually reveals itself to be an unconventional vampire story when Riley learns that Father Hill undid decades of aging by bringing back a monstrous vampire that restored his youth in exchange for feeding off the locals.

While Midnight Mass’s vampire twist allowed Flanagan to tackle a horror genre staple he had not depicted before, this did mean that it was far from the small-town creature feature it initially seemed like in its early episodes. Back in its first two outings, Midnight Mass could almost have passed for Stranger Things or Super 8, a small-town character study where a marauding monster was waiting in the wings to suddenly upend the lives of the main characters.

Instead, Midnight Mass’s vampires were thinking, feeling, and surprisingly cold and calculating villains, resulting in an ending that fused 30 Days of Night with Martin Scorsese’s Silence with a grim meditation on faith, religion, belief, and death. This couldn’t have been better, and made for a truly unique series. However, Below can now give viewers the one thing that was missing from Flanagan’s poignant, nuanced take on free will and determinism, namely, a big old monster.

Granted, the marketing materials of Below have not yet revealed the show’s monster. That said, none of Flanagan’s five Netflix shows in as many years ever featured a classic creature feature-style monster or a Lovecraftian beast, which Below seems to promise. Future The Shards star Igbo Rigney played a teen serial killer in his story from The Midnight Club, while other members of the title club told tales of hitchhiking ghosts, murderous doubles, and futuristic time travel.

However, even in 2023’s loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Fall of the House of Usher, Flanagan continued to steer clear of more traditional screen monsters. Thus, the prospect of Below offering viewers a Cthulu-inspired creation couldn’t be more exciting. That said, there is one problem with the upcoming show’s exciting premise, and that is the recent success of a very similar series.

Netflix’s Below Has Some Massive Horror Competition

Below will be unable to avoid comparisons to the modern classic Midnight Mass, as outlined above. However, not only will the show inevitably be compared to that hit, as an ensemble cast horror/self-contained miniseries set in an isolated seaside town with a tight-knit community besieged by some sort of supernatural monster, it’ll also unavoidably garner comparisons to 2026’s hugely acclaimed Widow’s Bay.

Essentially Midnight Mass crossed with the iconic workplace sitcom Parks and Recreation, this critically adored hit followed the beleaguered mayor of the titular island community as he attempted to drum up publicity for the tourist trap while dodging allegations of its town-wide curse. Of course, the twist was that the island really was haunted, and its mayor’s attempts to cover this up only exacerbated the problem.

Since Widow’s Bay was a loving parody of shows like Midnight Mass and Salem’s Lot while simultaneously functioning as a stellar small-town horror, and even made room for a cameo from Linklater, Netflix’s next seaside horror has a high bar to cross. Hopefully, Below’s follow-up to Midnight Mass can manage this when the series arrives in a few weeks.