There are sounds from Midnight Mass that I can still hear. The sound design of Mike Flanagan’s limited series is so singular that it will haunt me for a very long time. Re-recording mixer and co-supervising sound editor Jonathan Wales took advantage of the show’s setting and atmosphere to deliver one of the most memorable seasons of television of the year. His mixing will make you a true believer.
Wales has worked on a few of Flanagan’s projects, but his involvement with Midnight Mass seems meant to be.
“The funny thing is that the first time I ever talked to Mike about Midnight Mass was when we were working on Hush, because our main character is a writer. In Gerald’s Game, a shelf falls on top of the lead’s head while she’s in the bed and one of the books that falls down is called Midnight Mass. So this has been percolating in Mike’s head for for the longest time. I had a little inkling of what the concept was eight or so years ago.”
Since we enter a space unlike any other location in the country, creator Mike Flanagan created a topographical aid to ensure that Wales and his team could create separate spaces. If we were at the church, he wanted us to feel isolated from the other spaces. If a scene took place in someone’s home, Flanagan wanted distinct areas that couldn’t be affected by the outside world.
“We knew that that island had geography to it. One of the things we had right from the beginning is Mike made us a map–basically the island on the back of a napkin kind of thing. He’d show us where Riley’s house is right beside the ocean and he’d point out where the church is in the middle. We came up with these things like when you’re at the church, you don’t hear the ocean. There are no seagulls. When we’re inside the church, we really want to shut out the outside world, so you hear very little from outside when you’re inside those walls. We put a lot of stuff in and then started taking things out, because what we also realized at the beginning was we put a lot of things in and the problem came back. Mike was like, ‘This island is supposed to be dead. People aren’t doing anything.’ We actually had to take a lot of stuff away in order to get to the sort of the right amount of desolation. It was a big subtractive exercise and we were also incredibly specific about people. We tried very hard to keep that very authentic, which was not easy during COVID. To keep the people’s reactions realistic with things like how much they talk or whether they talk in church. We had this rule that they basically don’t talk in church except when they do or when they had to.”
Wales had to create a lot of levels throughout Midnight Mass, and for scenes in the church, he took his lead from Hamish Linklater. Linklater’s performance was pivotal in volume in the sermons in the church to the point that you might want to get up and take communion. When it came to the internal struggle one has when they were chosen by the angel, Wales wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a moment you laughed at.
“There’s a big temptation to have the audience be interactive in something like a sermon, and the reality is that in an environment like that, that’s the last thing they would ever do. They’re just going to be really quiet and then that gives you the license for when something really shocking happens. Hamish’s performance, I mean, is incredible. For putting sound together, having someone with a performance as compelling as his helps direct us in how to do it. There are only two sounds in the whole show that are associated with being not quite human anymore. One of them is that hunger sound when they feel the thing, and then it makes them hungry. And the other one is just what happens when when you see their vampire vision. One of the reasons is because Hamish gives such a great performance. The first time it happens to him, he’s in his bedroom, and he’s doubling over. Turn the sound off and just listen to only the dialogue–it’s all in his performance. A question became how to make something that connects with the audience that isn’t human, but it doesn’t become science fiction. We didn’t want it to sound like he had indigestion. We wanted hunger.”
In episode six, a heavenly choir leads the entire town to hell. The candlelight singing builds and builds as the group makes its way towards the church, but then Wales was tasked to contain the violence inside. You can hear bodies being thrown against the walls or dropping to the floor. It reverberates through your head.
“That was very hard for a lot of reasons. One of the most difficult things in that whole sequence–from when they stopped singing until the end of the terror–is Hamish’s continuity of giving this fervor and building everybody up to this level that they’re ready to sort of drink the Kool Aid. So the problem is because Mike decided to shoot this episode with different angles, it made it feel different, right? Which means there are very few boom angles available from Hamish. Every other time, we have boom angles, which sound really good. And now all of a sudden, we get into the church for the climactic sermon, and we’ve got the radio mic. The problem is the priests’ garb that he’s wearing makes an incredible amount of noise. It’s like every time he moves, it rustles. So we’re dealing with that with his mic, trying to get this epic performance of his to flow across all these weird different angles. Then had to get the audience to react to him just right. It’s also very long which is great but what it means is that it has to build right until the climax with a long time that it has to build over. We have to hold onto ourselves and not let the sound get too big to quickly.”
That intensity abruptly ends when the crowd turns to see the infamous angel standing at the back of the church. It’s no longer a figment of someone’s imagination and it’s no longer a whisper on the wind in the sky. The mood in the church stands still.
“It’s a thousand little things built together to make one big thing. It isn’t five big things even though it feels like it might be five big things. It’s all those Solo cups hitting the ground or different people throwing up or dying off screen. And you have to still make sure that you’re following the plot because it’s really easy to just get to a place where it just becomes a wall of noise. And then you have to figure out, ‘Okay, but how did I make it make sense?'”
The sound design of the angel will surprise viewers. Wales and his team created unearthly sounds, but I was shocked to discover that a lot of sounds from the angel actually came from Quinton Boisclair, the man behind all that makeup. The sound of the angel feeding on its victims is something I still can’t shake. There’s a strange intimacy brought to those horrific moments.
“A lot of that is actually his performance. That hissing sound? That’s him. It’s scary. He did that in one place and we knew that was the sound, and then we took it and Trevor Gates built things around it. There’s human stuff, some artificial stuff built in there, but the core is his performance. The eating stuff is incredibly hard, because–if you’re not careful–it sounds like they are making out. It’s a little slobbery, and it could sound like they’re kissing. There’s a wetness to it. If you overdo the gore, it sounds stupid. If we were to have one reference from Mike, the sounds also have to be honest. Of course those are the sounds when a vampire eats your neck, but figuring that out you have to also find out what is too far. You have to play with flesh tearing sounds, too. You have to play within the realm of what makes sense. He is sucking and drinking, and characters still have their necks at the end. It is fascinating, but it’s also so creepy.”
The final episode of Midnight Mass shows us the island descended into total chaos and terror. As these characters begin to hunt each other down, a massive fire threatens to engulf them all. It’s violent and terrifying. Like a lot of the sound design of this limited series, he played with the balance of the noise to ensure authenticity. He had to find the right balance so the story itself could be heard and end on a rapturously unexpected beautiful note.
“The fire is a backdrop to things that are happening. It’s extremely important, because the actors are responding to it but we need enough variety to it. We can’t get consumed by it to tire the audience with it. There is a lot of variation to the fire to establish where we are. Did it blow something up? We can’t have it feel like a warzone and it becomes disaster movie like. I mixed the whole thing with no fire and then I played with it. I dialed it back. “Nearer My God to Thee” was a big challenge because we didn’t get good production sound because the set was on fire. A lot of it was added with visual effects, but you’d be surprised how much practical fire there was. It wasn’t helpful because it was driven by gas and there was a lot of hissing. With that song, we had to build, but we had to make it sound like that group was the one singing it. We had to believe that it was them building and building that song within those circumstances. The fire was an important element because it helps drive the song. We couldn’t have it sound like a record.”
Midnight Mass is streaming now on Netflix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-XIRcjf3l4