How ‘Midnight Mass’ Created ‘Crockett Island’ During the Pandemic
For his latest horror series Midnight Mass, writer and director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor) had a small town built—the homes, the grocery store, the church—in the middle of a public park in British Columbia, just outside Vancouver. He called it “Crockett Island.”
In March 2020, when the team was just days away from filming, production halted, the real-life horror of the pandemic beginning its early act. Flanagan and his team were forced to leave Canada and Crockett Island. From the plane, Flanagan looked down on his set, his small town, which would sit uninhabited for the next several months. At the time, he didn’t know if he’d ever return.
But in August, Flanagan and his team became the first U.S. series to begin production in Vancouver. With rigid Covid protocols, the team shot the show in 83 days without interruption. In a series of tweets, Flanagan described the filming: “The crew worked closely for months without knowing what some people looked like below the eyes. When we’d glimpse someone changing a mask or drinking water in one of the “green zone” plexiglass booths on the outskirts of set, we’d be surprised to see each other’s faces.”
The series contains its own outbreak of sorts, a vampiric angel who causes the small town, “Crockett Island,” to descend into violent cannibalism while cut off from the mainland.
In reality, there was an outbreak, though not cannibalistic. And it didn’t occur on Crockett Island.
Is Crockett Island a real place?
Crocket Island wasn’t a real place before the series. With construction for the series, the town became a real place.
But Flanagan’s constructed town wasn’t built on an island. The fake town of Crockett Island existed as a massive set in Garry Point Park, a seaside public space just outside Vancouver, British Columbia. The shots of the town and water are Canadian mainland.
The establishing shots of the island, we are then led to believe, are the result of visual effects. No island exists which looks exactly like Midnight Mass’s Crockett Island.
Still, there are, several islands surrounding Vancouver, accessible only by ferry, if you want to plan a Midnight-Mass-inspired trip to the Pacific Northwest. “Crockett Island” itself just isn't one of them.
And the real tragedy of all this: if Crockett Island isn’t real, then so too isn’t Crock Pot Luck.
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