Flanagan has been open about the long road to making “Midnight Mass,” and while he hasn’t explicitly touched on why this story was repeatedly turned down, it’s hard to envision a catchy elevator pitch that’s about your own struggle with alcoholism and god. I mean, it’s not impossible to imagine, but it doesn’t really roll off of the tongue, you know? But instead of giving up, Flanagan soldiered on and laced “Midnight Mass” easter eggs throughout the rest of his work. Both “Hush” and “Gerald’s Game” prominently feature book props titled “Midnight Mass,” all the while Flanagan would candidly refer to the story as, “the best project I would never make.”

The story changed as it took up residence in Flanagan’s head, “It was a movie, it was a novel, it was a series,” said the director. Finally, the pure unadulterated commercial success and crossover appeal of his series “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The Haunting of Bly Manor” made “Midnight Mass” a reality, and this time Flanagan had settled on crafting a limited series purely because the feature script burning a hole in his back pocket was way too long for a movie. And while he had been fighting to make this personal project for years, Flanagan admits that opening himself and fully exploring these ideas was more than a little scary, saying, “What made it exciting, and kind of scary and uncomfortable sometimes, was that I really wanted to make sure that I was playing both sides of the board as passionately as I could.”

The road to “Midnight Mass” might have been long, but it was paved with excellent horror series and movies, and we can’t be mad about that.