Mike Flanagan’s Most Overlooked Horror Villain Hits Even Harder on a Rewatch

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Mike Flanagan is skilled at creating compelling villains. He often avoids a single antagonist, instead spreading the threat across multiple characters and allowing the danger to unfold organically. When the camera first focused on Bev Keane’s appearance in Midnight Mass, it was clear she would be the most fascinating character. It would be easy to dismiss her as a stereotypical, overbearing religious figure – a minor annoyance while the true monster does the heavy lifting – but she’s much more than that.

As a critic, I’ve seen plenty of villains, but Bev Keane in Midnight Mass truly stood out. Everyone was rightly scared of the mysterious ‘Angel,’ and felt sympathy for Father Paul, but looking back, Bev was the real threat. She wasn’t some monster acting on impulse; she was a quietly terrifying force, manipulating events from the shadows. While we were focused on the supernatural, she was the one actually in control, deciding the fate of Crockett Island with a chilling calm. She wasn’t just a busybody; she was the architect of the town’s destruction, and that made her far more frightening.

The Scariest Part of Bev Keane in Midnight Mass Is How Plausible She Is

Bev Keane, powerfully portrayed by Samantha Sloyan, is a truly frightening villain because characters like her are based on real people – and that’s what makes her so unsettling. She embodies the dangers of religious extremism, reminding viewers that such fanaticism exists in the real world. Unlike typical villains, her power doesn’t come from supernatural abilities or strength; instead, she uses religious texts to excuse her hateful beliefs and harmful actions.

Bev is consumed by her own sense of moral superiority, embodying a common pattern of thinking that feels unsettlingly familiar. Unlike the other troubled residents of Crockett Island, Bev doesn’t have a sad past to justify her cruelty. She isn’t burdened by ghosts, loss, or childhood trauma, as is often the case with characters in Mike Flanagan’s stories. Instead, she’s driven by a powerful need to control everything and a self-centered way of seeing the world.

Just like the island residents, the audience doesn’t immediately understand Bev’s motives or personality. The director subtly hinted at her hidden agenda and drastic choices through small actions throughout the series. In the first episode, we see a glimpse of her difficult personality when she criticizes Joe Collie’s beliefs and reacts sharply to him.

It seemed like she could have been excused for her actions, but that possibility vanished when she poisoned and killed a dog in the next episode. That moment revealed she wasn’t a typical character. Bev’s greatest skill is her deep knowledge of religious texts. She doesn’t simply recite scripture; she manipulates it to change how people perceive reality.

It’s horrifying how she twists scripture to excuse absolutely anything she does – poisoning animals, defying the law, even trapping people in a fire. It’s not about genuine belief for her; it’s a way to trick herself into feeling justified. She sees herself as the town’s moral compass, and it creates this awful cycle where whatever she does is automatically right because she’s the one doing it. That’s what really gets to me on rewatches – that chilling self-assurance. It makes her so much scarier than…

Bev is a villain who believed she was special and superior to others, and she deliberately destroyed the lives of anyone who opposed her. This kind of calculated cruelty is more frightening than any supernatural tale, because it doesn’t rely on ghosts or magic – just an enormous ego and the belief that one’s own opinions are absolute truth.

Samantha Sloyan’s Chilling Performance in Midnight Mass Made Bev Hateful

The story sets up Bev as the villain, but Samantha Sloyan’s incredible performance truly brings the character to life in a terrifying way. She manages to make Bev Keane deeply unsettling through subtle politeness – a surprisingly complex achievement. The brilliance of her acting is in the small details: her stiff posture, clasped hands, and slightly tilted head create a constant sense of being watched. She embodies a watchful, all-seeing presence, like a Big Brother figure observing everything in town.

It’s chilling to watch her, honestly. She seems so calm and reasonable on the surface, but you just know she’s thinking something awful underneath. The actress, Sloyan, is brilliant at showing that contrast – she delivers these truly hateful things in a soft, gentle voice. It’s not shouting or anger, it’s that ‘niceness’ that makes it so unsettling and manipulative. Like when she tries to confuse Sheriff Hassan about the Bibles at school – she doesn’t yell, she just smiles while she’s doing it. It’s incredibly insidious.

She disguises her prejudice as simple interest, skillfully manipulating the community against him while presenting herself as the injured party. This indirect, subtly hostile behavior is instantly relatable – we all recognize it from experiences with difficult people like overbearing neighbors, controlling family members, or frustrating colleagues. In Midnight Mass, this pattern of behavior is particularly memorable and impactful for viewers.

What truly makes the horror work in this film is Jessica Sloyan’s performance. She doesn’t play Bev as someone aware she’s the villain; she fully embodies someone who believes she’s doing the right thing, and she never lets on otherwise. It’s incredibly convincing. I recently spoke with Sloyan for Collider, and she explained her approach. Director Mike Flanagan emphasized Bev’s unwavering belief in herself, and Sloyan told me that became her guiding principle. Everything Bev says and does, Sloyan explained, is rooted in absolute conviction, which made finding the character surprisingly easy.

The show’s realism makes moments like the dog poisoning incredibly difficult to watch. Her coldness while Joe Collie mourns his dying dog is truly unsettling because it feels so genuine. She doesn’t revel in his pain like a typical villain; she’s simply apathetic, seeing the dog’s death as a practical necessity. This behavior establishes her as a deeply disturbing character.

Fans frequently compare her character to villains like Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and Mrs. Carmody from The Mist because she feels so convincingly malicious. Similar to them, she’s a threat from within, exploiting the established norms of her community to tear it apart. This skill at portraying that specific kind of cold, rule-following evil is what makes Bev Keane such a memorable and despised character in television.

Bev Believes She Is the Hero in Midnight Mass

What makes Bev Keane truly frightening is her unwavering belief that she’s always right. This led her to readily embrace anything she considered divine, no matter how strange, and bring it to both the town and the church without question. Essentially, she became a facilitator of disaster, convinced she held the moral authority on the island, and that conviction is what makes her so dangerous.

Although the story focuses on the island, Bev Keane is the one organizing everything as the world falls apart. She embodies the idea that real evil isn’t always dramatic or violent – sometimes it’s found in seemingly normal people, like those you’d meet at a town hall meeting. Bev isn’t interested in destruction; she wants a smooth takeover where she’s in charge.

The controlling power dynamics in the town were actually put in place long before any violence occurred. A key detail often overlooked is the history behind the oil spill settlement. Years earlier, Bev persuaded the town to accept money from the oil company that ruined their fishing industry, presenting it as a fortunate blessing.

Instead of helping the struggling town, Bev Keane used the funds to construct the Monsignor Pruitt Recreation Center – a beautiful but rarely used building that Joe Collie rightly describes as a way for her to hide money. The center stands as a symbol of her self-importance, built with money that could have helped her neighbors. It shows she was prioritizing corporate interests over her community’s well-being long before the events with the vampires began.

What really gets under my skin about Bev isn’t any outburst, but something much colder. When Father Paul, in a desperate moment, accidentally kills Joe Collie, she doesn’t react with horror – she starts planning. She doesn’t see a tragedy, but a problem to be solved. It’s chilling how quickly she spins it as God’s work, pulling scripture out of Deuteronomy to justify it like Joe was just some kind of wicked pest. She treats a dead man, her neighbor, like it’s nothing more than a mess to clean up. It reminded me of how she handled… well, other difficult situations, really.

Despite understanding Bev’s fear of being unremarkable, Flanagan doesn’t let her off the hook. In the story’s last scene, he shows her being punished for it. While the other survivors peacefully accept their fate as the sun rises—holding hands and singing—Bev is the only one who can’t cope. She abandons the group she pretended to guide and desperately tries to bury herself in the sand, hoping to escape the daylight.

The last image shows her losing everything. She doesn’t die because her beliefs were incorrect, but because she understood she wasn’t unique or important. Her faith wasn’t about being saved, it was simply a way to cope with life. In the end, she was left with nothing but fear and desperation, dying alone while those she had condemned found comfort and peace together.

Mike Flanagan has a really interesting point about horror and religion – he believes they’re deeply connected because religion often springs from our fear of death and, well, just general fear. We invent explanations – gods, if you will – for things we don’t understand, like natural disasters. And that, to me, is perfectly embodied by the character of Bev Keane. She isn’t about vampires or the supernatural; she’s about the very real monsters people become when they weaponize their beliefs. Bev truly believes her prejudices are God’s will, and that’s what makes her so chillingly awful – honestly, she might be Flanagan’s most terrifying creation yet.

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2025-11-28 07:39