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Rahul Kohli and Mike Flanagan Play Resident Evil Village | #GeekedWeek

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generally focused on stephen king adaptations and adapting from both the doctor sleep novel and the kubrick film

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2022

The Midnight Club

2021

Midnight Mass

2020

The Haunting of Bly Manor

2019

Doctor Sleep

2018

The Haunting of Hill House

2017

Gerald's Game

2016

Ouija: Origin of Evil (directed by)

2016

Before I Wake

2016

Hush (directed by)

2013

Oculus

2011

Absentia

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"He approaches addiction with the care and respect the subject deserves and has built upon the themes of addiction and recovery throughout his career."

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- family
- addiction
- grief
- depression

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- philosophy
- religion
- death
- eternal life
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v critical review of mm

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"recovery programs are intrinsically linked to religion"

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- portraying alcoholism and addiction in a more sympathetic light than most other stories of addicts

- hands on role in multiple areas of the filmmaking process (writer, director, showrunner, producer, editor)

- exploring religion

- using recurring actors, but making sure that the actor is right for the role - despite pressure from netflix, Kate Siegal nearly wasn't in Bly Manor

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Like Riley, Flanagan spent years studying various religions. Ultimately, the books that most spoke to him espoused atheism, rationalism and science — books by Samuel Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan. “I had more of a spiritual reaction from reading ‘Pale Blue Dot’ than I ever had reading the Bible,” Flanagan said.

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It reflects Flanagan’s experience when, after what he describes as a healthy Catholic upbringing — including 12 years as an altar boy — he finally read the Bible, and felt the scales fall from his eyes.

“I was shocked, for the first time comprehending what a really strange book it is,” he said. “There were so many ideas I’d never heard before in church, and the violence of the Old Testament God is terrifying! Slaughtering babies and drowning the earth! It really struck me that I didn’t know my faith at that point.”

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'it is inspired by some of his most persistent fixations, as well as his experiences with religion and addiction.'

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“Horror affords us the opportunity to really look at ourselves and the things that scare us, that disturb us, as a society and individuals,” he said. “It’s incredibly powerful.”

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'That includes the unease of being an author, not adapter. “There’s nowhere for me to hide now,” Flanagan admitted in a recent video interview, speaking from Los Angeles. “Behind Stephen King is a great place to hide. This is much more frightening.”'

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"fell in love with implied horror elements and suspense because they didn't show the shark for so long."

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"I fell in love with monologues because of Quint [Jaws]."

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- Annabeth Gish (3)
- Henry Thomas (5)
- Kate Seigel (7)
- Victoria Pedretti (2)
- Carla Gugino (4)
- Rahul Kohli (2)
- Elizabeth Reaser (2)
- Samantha Sloyan (3)
- Alex Essoe (3)
- Robert Longstreet (3)
- Micheal Trucco (2)
- James Flanagan (5)

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"the ethos of the show is to ask questions not give answers."

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"I wanted very much to try and tell a story wherin I would authentically try to inhabit both perspectives that exist within me about faith and about religion to see where I came out."

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"Faith is a signpost for who you are, so is what you fear. This show takes a hard look at both those things"

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Stretching Genre - A Haunting of Hill House Video Essay

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living with demons -> alcoholism

"it's just you and me then"

Riley's vision of Beth

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- Callie
- Luke Crain
- Henry Wingrave
- Danny Torrence
- Riley Flynn
- Joe Collie

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The Attraction Of Oblivion: Mike Flanagan’s Sympathetic Portrayals Of Addiction, Fire On The Set Of THE SHINING, And More!

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The last decade has seen the arrival of some brilliant new horror filmmakers - take the gut-wrenching nightmare-visions of Ari Aster, the sharp social commentary of Jordan Peele, or the eerie folktales of Robert Eggers. But few new spooky auteurs have been as prolific or consistent in knocking out scary (and surprisingly sad) gems in the 2010s as Mike Flanagan. Across the last decade, he's produced seven feature films and two major series, boasting hair-raising scares, palpitation-inducing tension, and - above all - melancholic meditations on loss, families, grieving and the nature of ghost stories. He's yet to make a dud, and between his Haunting Of Hill House series, and must-see Netflix movies like Hush and Gerald's Game, he's put his name to some outright future classics. Simply put, he's the new master of horror.

While Flanagan has been delighting hardened horror fans with his smart and spooky output for years, he's not quite a household name yet - so, in the spirit of Halloween, roll up, turn off all the lights, and allow Empire to plunge you into one of the most haunting filmographies of recent years.
Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man With The Plan (2006)
PLOT: Tim Russel (Scott Graham) is convinced a haunted mirror caused his father to kill his mother. He plonks himself in a room with the spectral furniture to prove it, filming the results - though his grip on reality rapidly slips.

Yes, you read that right - Oculus: Chapter 3. Except, this short film is actually the first incarnation of Flanagan's haunted mirror tale, cheekily titled as a threequel in a nod to the original becoming Episode IV ("The only thing we did was kinda demonstrate that we were not George Lucas," he joked). This 30-minute short is a super-sharp piece of DIY filmmaking, costing just $1500 to make - and consisting almost solely of one man talking in front of a mirror.

It may be lo-fi, but Flanagan's instinctive horror chops get a full workout here, deriving a thick atmosphere of dread from a minimal set-up. The opening 10 minutes - a monologue where Tim recounts the entire recorded history of the mirror and its victims - is especially effective, a series of non-stop mini horror stories, from a woman who systematically shatters her entire body with a hammer aside from the arm with which she wields the weapon, to a victim who dies of thirst in a full bath tub.

Most importantly, the Oculus short establishes some of Flanagan's most oft-visited themes right from the off: family trauma, the lingering horror of grief, literal and metaphorical ghosts, and inventively-executed high concepts.
Absentia (2011)
PLOT: Seven years after her husband Daniel went missing, Tricia (Courtney Bell) is now pregnant and decides to finally declare him dead 'in absentia' so that she can try and move forward with her life. But in doing so she finds herself haunted by his image - and her sister Callie (Katie Parker) feels his disappearance is linked to a mysterious local underpass.

A true indie movie, Absentia was partially funded on Kickstarter and cost just $70,000 to make. But what Flanagan's debut feature - which he wrote, directed and edited too - lacks in production value, it makes up for in a richly dramatic screenplay with compelling relationships between its central characters, and a properly spooky concept about an underpass that swallows people whole. With limited locations and players, Flanagan's first film is small but perfectly-formed.

Like the best indie debuts - think Christopher Nolan's , or Kevin Smith's - Absentia 's screenplay works entirely within the limitations of its budget, and the film is at its most satisfying when drawing out believable character relationships. There's Tricia, faced with the lingering questions around the sudden disappearance of her husband seven years ago and struggling with the guilt of 'giving up' on him, while also needing to start moving forward, for herself and the baby she's now carrying. And then there's her sister Callie - now back on the scene after being in rehab, the promise of a needle always tantalisingly in reach - who loves her sister but has clearly missed out on a lot while chasing her demons. It's a knotty dynamic that only gets more complex as the plot twists and turns.

While the character drama gets under the skin, there are early signs of Flanagan's gift for ghoulishness. With special effects at a minimum, the film instead derives considerable tension out of unsettling, lo-fi imagery: a lightly-wafting shower curtain, the looming spectre of Daniel in Tricia's peripheral vision, and eerie piles of soiled trinkets that start to appear in greater number in Tricia's house. And its downer ending is a real gut-punch, sure to linger longer than any CGI bogeyman.
Oculus (2014)
Largely underseen (it's not available digitally in the UK, though DVD and Blu-ray copies are available on Amazon), Absentia is a hidden gem - and one that saw Flanagan emerge as a feature filmmaker intent on picking apart the horror of loss and grief through compelling character dynamics.

PLOT: Traumatised as kids, Tim and Kaylie grew up amid spooky goings-on, seemingly brought on by a haunted mirror, leading to the deaths of their parents. As adults, Tim (Brenton Thwaites) leaves a psychiatric hospital no longer believing their deaths were supernatural - but Kaylie (Karen Gillan) has only become more convinced, and has tracked the mirror down.

For his second feature, Flanagan returned to the haunted-mirror tale that made his name, expanding his short film into a smart and spooky full-length psychological horror. Where the short was pared-down and succeeded thanks to the power of its unnerving stories, a proper budget allowed Flanagan to do so much more with the concept - not least delivering two concurrent storylines, as protagonists Tim and Kaylie battle the so-called Lasser Glass both as terrified kids and hardened adults.
Before I Wake (2016)
Flanagan's scares and storytelling are equally effective here - is all about the power of illusion, of not being able to trust what you see, and the boundaries of what is and isn't real for Tim and Kaylie are constantly blurred. Between that kind of psychological mind-trickery and a non-linear narrative, it's the sort of horror film that a young Christopher Nolan might have made.

There are echoes of The Shining in the flashbacks as the kids' parents are taken over by an evil power - notable, considering Flanagan's later projects - and while there are some nasty moments (a lightbulb-chomping incident is wince-inducing), the horror here is mostly emotional, rooted in Flanagan's favourite themes of cross-generational trauma, and making sense of grief and death. The way the past and the present are intertwined in Oculus is more than just a storytelling structure - it shows how the Russell kids, even as grown-ups, are still living through the events that haunted them all those years ago.

PLOT: Mark and Jessie Hobson (Thomas Jane and Kate Bosworth) are grieving the accidental death of their young son, and decide to foster youngster Cody (Jacob Tremblay). When the boy's dreams start coming to life, the Hobsons are enchanted - until his terrifying nightmares start materialising too.

Made in the wake of Oculus, Before I Wake went mostly unseen for years, lingering in limbo when Relativity Media went bankrupt - until Netflix picked it up in 2018. Away from that behind-the-scenes wrangling, the film itself saw Flanagan dig further into his chosen themes of children and parents haunted equally by loss and supernatural entities. While there are still clear horror overtones here, Flanagan swaps Oculus' cerebral clarity for a Guillermo del Toro-esque dark fairytale feel, leaning into the melancholy beauty of an orphaned boy - played dependably by Jacob Tremblay, who shot this before he made everyone weep in - whose dreams come to life when he sleeps.

It's a neat concept that lets Flanagan delve into some knotty emotion - because as well as dreaming a lot about butterflies (rendered somewhat cheesily at times in shiny CGI), Cody also dreams about Sean, the dead son of the couple who have adopted him, prompting mum Jessie to try and teach him more about her departed boy in order to see him materialise again each night. The only problem is that Cody also dreams a lot about The Canker Man, a blazing-eyed boogeyman linked to Cody's own repressed trauma.

PLOT: Deaf writer Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) lives in a remote woodland house where she's trying to finish her latest novel. But she finds herself stalked by a masked killer with a crossbow, faced with the major disadvantage that she can't hear him coming.
Ouija: Origin Of Evil (2016)
If any film stands as the odd one out in Flanagan's catalogue, it's Hush - there's no dual-timeline, no childhood grief, just a stripped-down home-invasion slasher with a high-concept set-up. But it's that lean efficiency and genre know-how that marks it as a Flanagan film, packed with ideas that make familiar subgenres feel fresh.

The most notable of which is, Hush 's protagonist Maddie (played by Flanagan's wife and frequent collaborator Kate Siegel, who also co-writes here) is deaf - a major disadvantage when being stalked by a masked psycho killer who's free to make as much noise as he pleases without being detected. The film benefits from clever sound design to create maximum tension - at times diegetic noises are accentuated like some kind of ASMR reel to highlight all the things Maddie can't hear, and at other moments the sound mix becomes near-completely muted to plunge the audience into her headspace. Sound itself even becomes a weapon at one point.

Bonus: In a particularly King-ian touch, Maddie is a horror writer - and the title of her hit novel, Midnight Mass is also the name of Flanagan's next Netflix miniseries, coming in 2021.

PLOT: In 1967 LA, Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) runs a bogus seance operation to provide for her daughters, Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson). But when she buys a Ouija board as a new prop for her act, it contacts something very real.
Gerald's Game (2017)
2016 was a prolific year for Flanagan. Months after Hush hit Netflix, he had a major Hollywood franchise horror out in cinemas for Halloween. And while the first Ouija was not a critical hit, Origin Of Evil is much better - a playful prequel that's a cut above most mainstream IP-driven scary films, let alone one based on a Hasbro product.

That's partly because the film revels in the period trappings afforded by its late-'60s setting - with digitally-applied cigarette burns, retro studio logos and an analogue-film aesthetic - and bears an initial tonal irreverence encapsulated by its central family of scammers, whose hokey spirit-medium operation is really an elaborate hoax. Until it suddenly isn't, with the casual purchase of a Ouija board opening the doors to real evil spirits lurking in the Zander household. The girls try to contact their dead dad Roger, and before you know it, Doris becomes possessed - and the bodies pile up.

As a haunted-house-meets-possessed-kid horror, the scares here pay homage to the likes of The Exorcist and - as well as Peter Medak's The Changeling - leading to a surprisingly bleak finale. Origin Of Evil 's parade of ghost-ride jolts showed that, even in more conventional trappings, Flanagan can cook up effective, perfectly-timed frights. And still, among the spooks, the dramatic meat lies in the family dynamic between Alice, Lina and Doris, and the void left by Roger's death.

Within Flanagan's filmography, Origin Of Evil notably marked the real beginning of his regular ensemble cast - bringing back Annalise Basso from Oculus, drafting in Kate Siegel for a supporting role, working for the first time with Elizabeth Reaser who would return in Hill House, and marking the first of many collaborations with Henry Thomas, here playing a priest with a tragic past.
The Haunting Of Hill House (2018)
PLOT: In an attempt to spice up their sex life, husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) and wife Jessie (Carla Gugino) travel to a woodland cabin for a weekend. As part of a sex game Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the bed - and then suffers a fatal heart attack, leaving his wife trapped and fighting for survival.

Where Oculus and Hush in particular saw Flanagan channel a strong Stephen King influence (some King books even pop up in Hush), his first time working directly with King material was an adaptation of one of his lesser-known novels. Gerald's Game had never made the leap to the screen before, largely because it's central concept - a woman is handcuffed to a bed - is far from inherently cinematic.

It's the emotional revelations that hit hardest though - as she contemplates ways she might escape, Jessie finds herself taunted by visions of both Gerald and her inner self (Gugino is stellar in the dual role), and recalls repressed memories of an abusive childhood that have reverberated through her subsequent life and marriage. Those flashbacks are shot through with deep red lighting, its own striking vision of hell. And when it comes time for Jessie to make her escape, one horrifyingly gory image is not easily shaken.
Doctor Sleep (2019)
Inventively shot, brilliantly acted (with performances from recurring Flanagan players Kate Siegel and Henry Thomas in the flashbacks as Jessie's parents), and deeply emotional, Gerald's Game is one of Flanagan's greatest achievements so far - taking a minor King work, and making it into a major modern King adaptation.

PLOT: Across the summer of 1992, the Crain family - parents Hugh (Henry Thomas) and Olivia (Carla Gugino) and their kids Steven, Shirley, Theo, Luke and Nell - experience increasing supernatural events while renovating creepy mansion Hill House, culminating in a family tragedy. As adults, the Crain children - who have each dealt with that summer in a different way - are drawn back to the house by a sudden loss.

Everything that Mike Flanagan had made so far led to The Haunting Of Hill House - a 10-episode series directed entirely by the man himself. Adapting Shirley Jackson's classic novel, Flanagan spun out a captivating series that then marked the culmination of years spent honing both his horror craft, and his ability to tell layered, emotional family stories.

As for the development of Flanagan's technical craft, it's Episode 6, 'Two Storms', that really wows - a series of extended takes (the longest clocking in at 17 minutes) presented as a single shot, as emotions spill over at a funeral. It's both deeply immersive and dizzyingly impressive - one shot even begins in the funeral parlour before continuing into the cavernous halls of Hill House itself, all within a single take. It's a bonafide horror masterpiece.
The Haunting Of Bly Manor (2020)
PLOT: Following his experiences in the Overlook Hotel as a child, the grown-up Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) has found a way to keep the ghosts at bay, but faces the same alcohol addiction that plagued his father all those years ago. When youngster Abra (Kyliegh Curran), who has the 'Shining' ability to an incredibly powerful degree, contacts Dan psychically, he tries to protect her from nefarious cult leader Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) and her gang of immortals, the True Knot.

Talk about a high-wire act - with Doctor Sleep, Flanagan had to weave together Stephen King's The Shining sequel novel with the Stanley Kubrick Shining film that King famously hated. And while the film near-miraculously manages both - staying true to King's story of an adult Dan Torrance, a powerful young psychic, and a troupe of vampiric immortals who feed on the 'Steam' of people who Shine, while retaining the iconic visual cues of Kubrick's Overlook - the name that often gets lost in discussing the film is Flanagan's.

Because, really, Doctor Sleep couldn't be more of a Mike Flanagan film - a horror-drama about childhood traumas that hang heavy over adulthood, about facing up to the ghosts of the past, about delving into deeply human flaws. It even has a final showdown in an abandoned spooky mansion building - albeit one of the most famous haunted hotels of all time. Across a 150-minute runtime, Flanagan's very deliberate pacing offers plenty of time to settle into the stories of Dan, Abra and Rose, getting into what makes them tick - Dan, forced to reckon with his past and reconnect with his Shine, Abra harnessing her power and pulling Dan out of the darkness, and Rose facing the extinction of the True Knot, carrying the weight of their continued existence on her shoulders.

And speaking of Rose The Hat, Ferguson's layered, magnetic villain already feels iconic - whether seducing her victims, or consuming their very souls, or battling the grief of losing her own family as their supplies of Steam begin to run low, she's captivating. For all that Flanagan clearly relishing playing with Kubrick's iconography, he brings plenty of his own startling imagery here, especially in a striking astral projection sequence.

Warmly received by critics but failing to catch light at the box office, there's a sense that time will be kind to Doctor Sleep. Perhaps audiences weren't prepared for the fact that it's not, in the traditional sense, a horror story. Or at least, not an overtly scary one. But it is King (via Kubrick) and Flanagan through and through, using supernatural and fantasy elements to dig into an emotional family story.

PLOT: American au pair Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) gets a job at British country mansion Bly Manor, looking after orphaned children Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) and Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). But there are spooky goings-on with everyone connected to Bly - especially regarding the death of former housekeeper Ms. Jessel (Tahirah Sharif) and her disappeared lover Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen).

Over time, Flanagan's output has become more sentimental. Where the likes of Absentia, Oculus and Ouija: Origin Of Evil revel in downbeat endings, more recently he's offered conclusions that lean towards the sweetness in the bittersweet. And The Haunting Of Bly Manor is his most overtly romantic work yet - a series of intertwined ghost stories trapped within (doomed) love stories.

Notably, Flanagan himself was less involved here than he was on Hill House - while still the creator and executive producer, he only wrote and directed the first episode. And if it's not as masterful or groundbreaking as that prior series, Bly Manor - based on The Turn Of The Screw and other Henry James tales - continues the filmmaker's ethos of placing character at the centre of everything, with ghosts (often literally) on the periphery.

While much of the Hill House cast returns - including stand-out Victoria Pedretti, here taking centre stage, plus major roles for Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Henry Thomas, and an important but spoilery role for Kate Siegel near the series' end - it's the newcomers who make the greatest impact. T'Nia Miller is both steely and deeply human as housekeeper Hannah Grose, whose chemistry with Rahul Kohli's house cook Owen spins some of the most satisfying threads of the series. And then there's Amelia Eve as gardener Jamie, who develops a truly touching relationship with Pedretti's Dani Clayton that hits harder than any scary shock. For the most part, the ghosts of Bly Manor are lost loves, heartbroken souls that linger on - it is, in all senses, a spin on the traditional gothic romance.

So, what's next? Flanagan is currently shooting his new Netflix series Midnight Mass, about a priest who arrives at a mysterious island community, and of which he'll direct every episode, sending him into his second decade of cooking up horror stories for screens big and small. If his work over the last ten years is anything to go by, we're in for a treat. The new master of horror is here to stay.

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Mike Flanagan: A Film-By-Film Guide To The New Master Of Horror

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The last decade has seen the arrival of some brilliant new horror filmmakers - take the gut-wrenching nightmare-visions of Ari Aster, the sharp social commentary of Jordan Peele, or the eerie folktales of Robert Eggers. But few new spooky auteurs have been as prolific or consistent in knocking out scary (and surprisingly sad) gems in the 2010s as Mike Flanagan.

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True Horror Comes from Within | Mike Flanagan Video Essay

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[ Fantasia 2020 ] Mike Flanagan on Literary Adaptations and Personal Horror Creation

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Dead Doesn't Mean Gone - A Haunting of Bly Manor Video Essay

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Mike Flanagan Returns To Talk Netflix’s 'Midnight Mass'

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Mike Flanagan's Journey to Becoming the New King of Horror

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Trevor Macy and Mike Flanagan on the Making of MM

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Trevor Macy and Mike Flanagan on the Making of MM

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MIDNIGHT MASS Interview | Mike Flanagan and Cast Talk Terrifying New Series

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Mike Flanagan | The Film That Lit My Fuse

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- split diopters
- dutch tilt
- unusually long takes
- muted colour palettes, occasional moments of bright colour used to punctuate narrative moments rather then solely visual stimulation

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- James Flanagan (writer: 2)

- The Newton Brothers (composers: 9)

- Michael Fimognari (cinematographer: 7)
- Trevor Macy (producer: )

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- Addiction

- Family

- Trauma response

- Character studies

- Time

- Living with your demons

- Philosophy and Religion

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Mike Flanagan's new series, "Midnight Mass," was inspired by his experiences with religion and addiction. Credit... Brad Torchia for The New York Times

In the new Netflix series, the acclaimed adapter of works by Shirley Jackson and Stephen King tells a more personal story.

Mike Flanagan's new series, "Midnight Mass," was inspired by his experiences with religion and addiction. Credit... Brad Torchia for The New York Times

The writer-director Mike Flanagan has become best known for his adaptations of works by Shirley Jackson ("The Haunting of Hill House"), Henry James ("The Haunting of Bly Manor") and Stephen King ("Gerald's Game," "Doctor Sleep"). The horrors in his latest project, "Midnight Mass," a seven-episode limited series that premiered Friday on Netflix, are homegrown.

That includes the unease of being an author, not adapter. "There's nowhere for me to hide now," Flanagan admitted in a recent video interview, speaking from Los Angeles. "Behind Stephen King is a great place to hide. This is much more frightening."

Flanagan has earned a reputation for what might be called humanistic horror. Beyond the ghouls and goose bumps, much of his work is centered on deeply felt family drama, populated by damaged characters wrestling with the everyday terrors of being a parent, a partner, a human being. "The Haunting of Hill House," his popular Netflix series from 2018, plays out like "Six Feet Under" with poltergeists.

Sometimes the endings of his shows and movies, which offer long-suffering characters a measure of peace, are derided by more sadomasochistic fans of the genre. But Flanagan, while never skimping on the nightmare fuel, believes that horror can offer something deeper.

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In "Midnight Mass," strange things start happening after a young priest comes to an isolated island community. Credit... Eike Schroter/Netflix

"Horror affords us the opportunity to really look at ourselves and the things that scare us, that disturb us, as a society and individuals," he said. "It's incredibly powerful."

"The Haunting of Hill House" was infused with Flanagan's own experiences with death in his extended family, including specific imagery from his life. But "Midnight Mass," he said, is by far his most personal work - it is inspired by some of his most persistent fixations, as well as his experiences with religion and addiction.

It begins with a young man and the aftermath of a terrible accident. After years in prison looking for God - not only in the Christian Bible but also in every holy text he can lay his hands on - Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) returns to his childhood home on an isolated island to stay with his family. Soon after, following the arrival of a young, jeans-wearing priest (Hamish Linklater), strange things start happening. Some seem like gifts from an all-loving God; others not so much. Either way, a higher power appears to be taking an active interest in worldly affairs.

That's right: After having successfully taken on Jackson, James and King, Flanagan is taking on God.

At first glance, the quiet island community of the show seems far from the spooky mansions of "Haunting." In fact, "Midnight Mass" - which also stars the "Haunting" actors Henry Thomas and Kate Siegel, Flanagan's wife - draws on many of the same preoccupations of that series in its interrogations of theology and faith.

"When you're talking about the afterlife and the soul, you're talking about ghosts," Flanagan said. "We can't help but be attracted to the idea that death isn't the end for us, and that we're going to see the people we've lost again. That idea is one of the things that interested me in horror in the first place, and is as much behind our religions as it is behind our horror fiction."

Flanagan's adaptation of "The Haunting of Hill House" was a hit for Netflix in 2018. Credit... Steve Dietl/Netflix

He first pitched "Midnight Mass" as a television show in 2014. "Everybody passed on it, including Netflix," he said. Before that, it had been an unfinished film script, and before that an attempted novel. "Midnight Mass" appeared as a prop book in Flanagan's films "Hush" and "Gerald's Game," his own way of keeping the idea alive over the years. (He would tell curious crew members, "That's the best project I'll never make.")

But the show's origins go back much further. It reflects Flanagan's experience when, after what he describes as a healthy Catholic upbringing - including 12 years as an altar boy - he finally read the Bible, and felt the scales fall from his eyes.

"I was shocked, for the first time comprehending what a really strange book it is," he said. "There were so many ideas I'd never heard before in church, and the violence of the Old Testament God is terrifying! Slaughtering babies and drowning the earth! It really struck me that I didn't know my faith at that point."

Like Riley, Flanagan spent years studying various religions. Ultimately, the books that most spoke to him espoused atheism, rationalism and science - books by Samuel Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan. "I had more of a spiritual reaction from reading 'Pale Blue Dot' than I ever had reading the Bible," Flanagan said.

"Midnight Mass" speaks to his continued interest in matters of faith, including faith in its most extreme form. "I'm fascinated by how our beliefs shape how we treat each other," he said. "Looking at politics and the world today, so many of us are behaving based on the belief that God is on our side, and that God dislikes the same people we do."

Zach Gilford, center, stars in "Midnight Mass" as a spiritual seeker ex-con. Credit... Eike Schroter/Netflix

Another of Flanagan's private horrors found its way into the show: his struggle with alcoholism. "I come from a long line of drunken Irishmen," he said.

"But my biggest fear wasn't that I would die in a drunken car accident," he continued. "It was that I would kill someone else and live. That is the beating heart of 'Midnight Mass.'"

Flanagan himself spent much of his childhood on a weird little island. The family lived for a number of years on Governors Island, in New York Harbor, where his father served two stints in the U.S. Coast Guard.

It was a place that lent itself well to ghost stories and an active imagination. Flanagan immersed himself in the young-adult horror novels of John Bellairs, R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike, finally braving Stephen King's "It" in the fifth grade. Defying his mother's wishes, he later watched the ABC mini-series adaptation (1990) on VHS - a self-emboldening exercise and the beginning of a lifelong obsession with King's work. In sixth grade, he and his friends created a 20-minute film of "It" in the backyard. ("I've since apologized to Stephen for the unlicensed adaptation," Flanagan said.)

He studied film at Towson University in Maryland, where he made a series of three talky movies about love and life on campus. "The 90-minute episodes of 'Dawson's Creek' no one asked for," he said.

Flanagan in his home in Los Angeles. "I wasn't in a place where I could handle the material until now," he said of "Midnight Mass." Credit... Brad Torchia for The New York Times

He knew he had found his calling, even if he hadn't quite found his genre. Moving to Los Angeles, he allowed himself five years to get his foot in the door as a feature filmmaker. Five years went past - twice. He ultimately spent 12 years working as an editor, cutting together late-night car commercials and reality television. Sculpting sense out of piles of raw footage was a useful education, though Flanagan didn't always feel that way about it at the time. (For the record, he regards his work on " Jealous of My Boogie," a music video for "RuPaul's Drag Race," as up there with some of his best.)

Flanagan was still working as an editor while he directed his Kickstarter-funded feature film, "Absentia" (2011), shooting on weekends with equipment borrowed from work. He was finally able to quit his day job partway through production of his follow-up feature, "Oculus" (2014). The two films were well received, but they end on notes of despair that became much rarer in his work.

A more hopeful view of the world found its way into his scripts after he quit the editing gig, became a parent and married Siegel. Flanagan began making the kind of horror that both chills the bones and makes you want to patch things up with a family member afterward.

He has been sober for three years now. "I had people in my life tell me, 'If you drink enough, it's a different person that comes out, and he's pretty terrible.'" he said. "I finally hit the point where I said if I don't change this behavior, I don't know what will happen."

That change in trajectory might have something to do with how, for all its terrors, "Midnight Mass" conveys a faith in humanity and redemption. The newfound sobriety is also one of the reasons that, even after struggling so long to get "Midnight Mass" off the ground, he is relieved he didn't get to make it sooner. "I wasn't in a place where I could handle the material until now," he said, sounding grateful.

"I was writing about alcoholism but wasn't yet sober; I was writing about atheism, but I hadn't gotten over my anger," he continued. "I've had some beautiful revelations."

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Mike Flanagan Explores His Private Horrors in 'Midnight Mass'

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In the new Netflix series, the acclaimed adapter of works by Shirley Jackson and Stephen King tells a more personal story. Mike Flanagan's new series, "Midnight Mass," was inspired by his experiences with religion and addiction. Credit...

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Netflix's Midnight Mass is horror director Mike Flanagan's favorite project yet. He reveals why it's intensely personal...but also universal.

Photo: Netflix

This article contains no spoilers for Midnight Mass.
Horror auteur Mike Flanagan is responsible for many excellent spooky sagas since his first major film debuted in 2013. The writer/director has shepherded films like, , and ; and TV series like Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Still, even with such a deep resume, there's room for only one favorite. And according to Flanagan himself, that favorite is definitively his latest TV collaboration with Netflix, Midnight Mass.

"I'm just going to admit it-Midnight Mass is my favorite project so far," Flanagan wrote to critics in a letter accompanying advanced screeners of the seven-episode project.

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After and several other outlets had the opportunity to speak with Flanagan further via Zoom, it soon became clear why. Midnight Mass is an intensely personal outing for the Salem, Massachusetts-born scare supervisor.

For starters, Flanagan has been working on Midnight Mass for longer than any other project in his career, having begun germinating the idea for the story before production even began on. The tale about the isolated Crockett Island and a mysterious preacher who comes to town and shakes things up has been worked on in several mediums - as a novel, a screenplay for a feature, and two separate attempts at a TV show (the second of which was successful, and the first of which fizzled out in 2014)

In fact, Easter eggs to the at-the-time unproduced story have popped up in Flanagan's previous works such as in a fictional book published by 's lead character Maddie Young (Kate Siegel). So, while Midnight Mass may have all the markings of a traditional "Flana-verse" horror outing for its creator, it's clear that this project is different.

"The biggest difference for me is that this project has always been where I've focused on putting all the personal stuff in," Flanagan says. "It deals with a lot of what I think about faith and religion and what it means to be alive in the world and what happens when we die. You know, all the little questions like that."

Chief among the reasons as to why Midnight Mass is personal to Flangan is its depiction of faith. The Catholic Church is at the center of life on Crockett Island, and it was the Catholic Church that had an outsized impact on Flanagan in his youth. Producing partner Trevor Macy describes Flanagan as an "encyclopedia" of the Bible and church rites. That deep understanding of religious myth led into an even deeper understanding of horror.

"When I was a kid in Bible Study, the horror elements of the Bible were impossible to ignore," Flangan says. "If you open the book you've got angels patrolling through Egypt and slaughtering the first-borns. You've got a river turning into blood. You've got plagues of locusts and a pillar of fire."

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Also personal for Flanagan is how Midnight Mass reflects his struggles with alcoholism before ultimately achieving sobriety in 2018. Flanagan, who has now been sober for three years, says that much of his anxieties around alcoholism are depicted in the series, particularly in lead character and recovering alcoholic Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford).

"I see cries of that through a lot of my past work. But this is the oldest and it's so embedded in it," he says. "It was very frightening to be vulnerable about it because I spent years in complete denial that I had any issues with alcohol."
All seven episodes of Midnight Mass are available to stream on Netflix now.
Though Midnight Mass is particularly personal for Flanagan, it's also just like any piece of art of entertainment constructed with viewers in mind. This is an incredibly bold, and at times wildly compelling piece. Den of Geek will be diving deep into the show's many twists and turns shortly. For now, Flanagan is hopeful that what's personal for him will translate to something universal.

"We all, I think, are wrestling with questions of 'why are we here? What's the point of being alive? Where do the people we love go when they're gone?' I think the only thing that divides us as people are the answers we come to. The questions are 100 percent universal."

TV Editor at Den of Geek and Television Critics Association member. Based in Cleveland, Ohio. Very upset about various sporting events.

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Why Midnight Mass is Mike Flanagan's Most Personal Work | Den of Geek

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Netflix's Midnight Mass is horror director Mike Flanagan's favorite project yet. He reveals why it's intensely personal...but also universal. This article contains no spoilers for Midnight Mass . Horror auteur Mike Flanagan is responsible for many excellent spooky sagas since his first major film debuted in 2013.

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Even when he isn't adapting Stephen King, writer-director Mike Flanagan has carved out a successful niche around stories that feel like they could have been adapted from Stephen King.

Most good horror comes from a play of allegory, where the thing that scares us might look like a killer clown or a ghost or a magic-wielding traveler with a funny hat, but it's really addiction or grief or anything repressed. Like King, Flanagan has a gift for sometimes pushing that subtext far past the surface. A genre fan might at first be disappointed - "But wait, I was promised telekinetic murderous hamster-people, and you're giving me a 45-minute AA meeting" - only to have the snot scared out of them when the telekinetic murderous hamster-person devours our hero's sponsor.

Airdate: Friday, Sept. 24

Creator: Mike Flanagan

Flanagan's latest Netflix limited series - his third in four years, after respective hauntings at Hill House and Bly Manor - may be the furthest he's pushed the subtext to date and it may, in turn, be his least purely scary offering. Midnight Mass (which crosses Needful Things with another King story that I won't name so as not to spoil anything) isn't braced with a single clear allegorical support beam. It's about grief and addiction, but more than anything it's an exploration of organized religion.

This is clearly the work of someone who has taken a deep inventory of his spiritual upbringing. That surely won't keep some viewers from calling it bizarrely sacrilegious (it is, usually by intent) and others from lamenting how frequently it ignores the need for genre thrills in favor of long monologues about creed and ritual (it does, probably by intent). I found it consistently committed and admirably bonkers, even when it tested my patience. Whatever your reactions to the show happen to be, and some people are going to absolutely hate it, those reactions will come from a very personal and primal place, just like the place Flanagan has mined to make it.

The seven-episode series is packed with details that Netflix would prefer not be spoiled, so allow me to tiptoe. The series is set on Crockett Island, population 127. Crockett was never exactly thriving, but since a coastal oil spill, work has dried up and residents have been departing. That hasn't stopped a pair of prodigal children from returning. Riley (Zach Gilford) is newly paroled after serving time for a crime that haunts his dreams, and has reunited with his parents (Henry Thomas and Kristin Lehman), who felt his departure from Crockett was already a betrayal. Erin (Kate Siegel) is taking over from her late mother as the island's teacher, seeking a fresh start that coincides with her pregnancy.

Additional change has arrived in the form of Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), a charismatic priest replacing the island's longtime monsignor. Miracles are about to occur that will affect residents including the paralyzed daughter (Annarah Cymone) of the mayor (Michael Trucco), the town drunk (Robert Longstreet), the local doctor (Annabeth Gish) and the Muslim sheriff (Rahul Kohli), who is concerned when those miracles spawn a wave of devotion, then zealotry and then, if you wait patiently enough, stranger and sometimes scarier stuff.

As any Bible reader can tell you, amidst the "begets" and endless codes of conduct, the Good Book has more than its share of fantastical elements. There's a main protagonist who talks through burning bushes and turns women into salt pillars. There are resurrections, wrestling angels, people being swallowed by fish - and that's before you get to whatever the heck is happening in the Book of Revelations. This is not exactly a deep reading of the Bible. There are more than a few points at which Midnight Mass feels like the work of a slightly bored altar boy killing time by realizing that if you adapted the text literally, the Bible would be completely R-rated and very difficult to take seriously.

That, of course, is where faith comes in, as well as the covenants passed down through hundreds of generations. Any fiction driven by the supernatural, whether or not it's a horror story, requires a suspension of disbelief. Religion requires a purer form of belief, a total buying-in rather than just a setting aside of skepticism. The ambitious challenge Flanagan has set for himself in Midnight Mass is that he's applying the religious standard to a story that becomes more and more outlandish as it goes along. He might not be asking viewers to believe that the events on Crockett Island could be real, but Flanagan needs you to accept that in this world, the residents would want or need to believe that they are, each for their own reasons. This is a place, after all, where every character is plagued by some measure of isolation and seeking some form of communion, be it the blood and body of their savior, or simply community, as in the solace of a support group.

It isn't always the easiest of sells, partially because at some point there's something monstrous revealed and it looks like a cross between BoJack Horseman 's Vincent Adultman (three boys stacked on top of one another inside a trench coat) and Slenderman. By the time the show gets around to revealing this figure's true genre purpose, most viewers will either be completely out or completely in. The latter category requires a willingness to embrace multiple climactic episodes of gory chaos punctuated by 15-minute dialogues about alcoholism, the afterlife and interpretations of the New Testament that sometimes rise to the level of profound and sometimes fall to the level of "duh."

Actually, maybe it's not as cut-and-dry as that, because the fifth episode contains one of those seemingly endless portentous gabfests that, in this case, left me rolling my eyes and then ended with a scene that could have been ridiculous and instead leveled me. In Flanagan's particular style, I'm not sure you could necessarily have the latter without the former. The same with a finale - Flanagan again mines several conclusive Stephen King tropes, not necessarily for the best - awash in only-partially-intended giggles, yet concluding with unexpected power.

Flanagan, who directed the entire series and wrote or co-wrote all its episodes, achieves a good deal of the sincerity he's after - in large part because he has put together an ensemble that mirrors his commitment. That doesn't, however, always add up to great acting.

Within his established troupe, Flanagan continues to play expertly to the strengths of Siegel (who is also his wife). She and Gish are moving in their characters' quiet moments as well as their explosive ones; there's very little in-between in this series. Flanagan veterans Longstreet, very capable of chewing scenery in ways that almost feel grounded, and Samantha Sloyan, as the embodiment of Crockett's raveling zealotry, give bigger, complementary performances. Among the newcomers to Flanagan's fold, Gilford and Linklater are standouts, the former excellent at playing mournful to the point of incapacitation, and the latter delivering more than a half-dozen extended speeches with an evangelist's fervor.

In typically showy mode, the camerawork is itself a star, whether giving life to the run-down primitivism of the island locations or executing one of Flanagan's trademark single-shot takes. The director isn't, however, drawing peak returns from his reliance on haunting thunderstorms or bump-in-the-night jump-cut frights. Fewer of the terror set pieces land than in The Haunting of Hill House, but there are images here that are evocative, sad or disturbing enough to nearly carry a bloated 66-minute episode on their own. Flanagan's next challenge will be figuring out how to make one of those two-people-on-a-couch scenes cinematic.

More than faith in the events of the show, Midnight Mass requires faith in Flanagan and the seriousness of purpose within his Stephen King pastiches. Even if the miniseries doesn't stick its frightful landing, its ecclesiastical eeriness is a thing worth mulling over, be you rapturous or a doubting Thomas.

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Even when he isn't adapting Stephen King, writer-director Mike Flanagan has carved out a successful niche around stories that feel like they could have been adapted from Stephen King. Most good horror comes from a play of allegory, where the thing that scares us might look like a killer clown or a ghost or a magic-wielding traveler with a funny hat, but it's really addiction or grief or anything repressed.

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[This story contains spoilers for the first season of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House.]

As Mike Flanagan worked on his take on the classic tale The Haunting of Hill House, he felt a specter looking over his shoulder: the ghost of Shirley Jackson. The writer and director responsible for films like Oculus, Hush, Gerald's Game, and the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep is a natural horror buff, especially of Jackson's original work.

"I loved the book since I was a kid," Flanagan tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I've equally loved Robert Wise's [film] adaptation." Finding it a fool's errand to try to reinvent the wheel, when he was approached to do a televised take on the story, he chose to take it in a completely different direction. Gone is the plot of four adults investigating paranormal activities, now substituted by a family of seven helplessly besieged by the titular house and its mysterious allure, even decades after the fact.

Flanagan talks with THR about the methodology behind his adaptation, including the thinking behind his fractured timeline, the "Bent Neck Lady" and the "Red Room," as well as how the first season was initially supposed to end.

What inspired the deviation you took from Shirley Jackson's original novel?

When [Netflix] first approached me about the show, my gut reaction was, "Well, it's been done beautifully already. It lends itself perfectly to a feature format. I don't know how you expand what's on the page to fill a season of television. It would have to be a whole new deal." So I went back through the book, and I figured the only way through the woods was [that] we were going to need a much larger character palette to carry a series. I'm just naturally drawn to family drama, and I think in horror, in particular, the way people behave in their families is different than the way they behave out in the world. It strips away all the pretext.

So for me, it was about identifying the elements, characters, moments and even chunks of prose from the book that I really loved and taking all those pieces and trying to build something different out of the same ingredients. It was an odd experiment in that sense because I loved the book so much, I didn't want to hurt it. ( Laughs.) I approached it more as a remix. Once I started looking at it that way, it opened up a lot of really fun possibilities where I could do something that was our own, but I could pepper in the moments of the book that impacted me the most.

The most prominent element of that remix involves your storytelling method, done between two timelines. What led you to pursue showing the main characters both as children and adults?

I love a fractured timeline. I think television is full of really effective examples of how you can play with those timelines in a way that modern TV audiences enjoy. I first sparked to it with Lost and . That was really exciting to me, being able to shed the linear requirements that so many features come with.

I feel like when you talk about a person being haunted, a ghost is boring unless it's directly tied to an experience, emotion or something that's intrinsic to a character. We're all haunted as people, and that was what I thought would make this interesting. Ghosts popping out and scaring somebody can only be interesting one or two times.

If we were going to be doing this as a long format, it had to be about the way every family is a haunted house, and everyone is wrestling with their ghosts from their own childhood and beyond - that echo through decades. That's what I wanted to explore more of, more than the gothic horror and genre moments. Those can be tedious after a while if you're not focused on the characters.

We get to see moments continuously echo between these two timelines, both forward and backward. The final episode features a monologue from Nell (Victoria Pedretti) about this idea, where she mentions her view of time changing from a line of dominoes falling to a scattering of moments like rain. Why did you use that thinking to connect your two stories?

That passage that you referenced is one of my favorites in the show. We talk about memory, and we talk about our experience of our childhood and how we process our family and our formative years. It is such a non-linear thing. It's something that we look back on and experience in a kaleidoscope instead of a series of cause and effect. That was something thematically that found itself into the writers room very early. We knew the ending before we knew anything else. So it was like, "OK, how do we get there in a way that's going to honor Nell's experience?" That was one of the most exciting aspects of it for me.

One of the advantages you were able to take in a serialized format is the use of build. When we first see Steven (Michiel Huisman), he's almost the audience analogue, as we're also trying to figure out a rational explanation behind what's going on before things build to a fever pitch. What was the process of writing that rising action like for you?

We always looked at it like a 10-hour movie. The trick for me was, "How do we sustain tension and how do we make sure we don't have scenes that dissipate?" I wanted them to echo in later episodes. It's one of the opportunities that episodic TV presents; the episodes can be warped mirrors of each other. It was a blend of trying to approach it the way I would a very long film but [also] try to take advantage of the format in a way that let us light a lot of fuses and run a lot of threads that wouldn't necessarily pay off for a long time. We all wanted it to be something you can watch more than once and get something different out of it.

A big thread came from the reveal of the "Bent Neck Lady," where it turns out the spirit that's been haunting Nell since her childhood was the future version of herself in her last moments. How did you approach the idea of ghosts in your adaptation?

We actually fleshed out a thorough history for Hill House. We intended to shoot it; it was going to open each episode with a chapter from Steven's book. Ultimately, we went away from that because it felt like that was taking away from the mystery and enigma of it.

We were going to take the position, especially with the Bent Neck Lady, that a ghost in this show is not necessarily what you think it is. A ghost can be a premonition, or in Shirley's [Elizabeth Reaser] case, an imagined manifestation of guilt. It felt like we were going to hurt that theme if we spent too much time trying to explain the ghosts. By the end, we put in more ghosts than the story of the house would even support. I wanted to feel like the things that were collected there were too sprawling for the actual amount of time the house existed. It collected these fractured psyches of the people who had been inside.

Speaking of those fractured psyches, I want to talk about the mysterious "Red Room." In the finale, it's revealed that while the room appears locked on the surface, it's actually served as a unique space suited to each family member's tastes. Nell mentions how it lured them in with comfort while simultaneously "digesting" them. How did you come up with this concept?

It was one of our writers, Rebecca Klingel, who had first pitched it. I had wanted something really special for the Red Room. We knew we were going to keep that door closed for a long time. I was saying along the lines of, "We're going to want to see what's in that room so badly by the end of this, whatever it is has to be great." And she pitched, "Well, what if we have seen it, and we just don't know it?" There's something really insidious about being placated while being eaten by this house. ( Laughs.)

So we used the same set; we just redressed and repainted it for each use. It gets really specific to who they are as to what's dressed inside. That was really fun, the idea that we could use our production design for that space to reflect aspects of the character. That was one of my favorite twists that came out of the writers room. It gave us an engine for most of the first half of the season.

One of the prevailing themes throughout The Haunting of Hill House is building a wall. Early in the season, Olivia advises Theo to build a wall of bricks around her to make her safe. But by the end, we get the story of the man found inside the basement wall, who put himself in there to get rid of fear and guilt, only to have them next to him. How did this become an idea that transcended both timelines?

That was a thing that struck me about Shirley Jackson's book: the walls that Nell had put up. Eleanor in the novel has walled herself off from society; she's so sheltered and has never really left home. She goes from this completely contained and insular existence to what she perceives as the expansive world around her. And it's just another house; it's another box. For the show, it seemed like a wonderful thing that happens with families. The psychological safe spaces that we make for ourselves and our family members, and how much of a challenge it is to tear them down. That was a theme that Shirley Jackson got into our heads with and inspired a lot of us in the writers room to thread that through in many ways.

Let's talk about the very end of the season. While the family members still alive come together to celebrate Luke's (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) sobriety, we get a monologue from Steven about how fear and love are the same types of emotion. They're like siblings, both involving the relinquishment of logic and patterns. Why did you choose to end the Crain story this way?

A lot of it is a shared experience we all connected with in the room. It's really hard to resolve horror; it's hard to end stories like this. We had been through so much in the course of writing it. Each of us had dug so deep into our own families and stories to try to inform the show that we all craved a moment of peace at the end.

We toyed with the idea for a little while that over that monologue, over the image of the family together, we would put the Red Room window in the background. For a while, that was the plan. Maybe they never really got out of that room. The night before it came time to shoot it, I sat up in bed, and I felt guilty about it. I felt like it was cruel. That surprised me. I'd come to love the characters so much that I wanted them to be happy. I came in to work and said, "I don't want to put the window up. I think it's mean and unfair." Once that gear had kicked in, I wanted to lean as far in that direction as possible. We've been on this journey for 10 hours; a few minutes of hope was important to me.

On the other side, you have the family members who died. The siblings can get their finished business with Nell, while Hugh (Timothy Hutton) agrees to join Olivia (Carla Gugino) and "wake up" in exchange for their children's freedom. It's as if to say it will be OK here and it will be OK in the end, even though the journey may never technically end.

Steven inherits Hugh's responsibility, and the house is still standing. It's still haunted, and everyone's still trapped. But they're together. It is a little bittersweet. When we think about families, that's what we're left with. We're stuck with our family no matter what, and even if it's not going to be OK, even if we're never going to get back what we lost, at least we can find a way to live with that. That little bit of comfort meant a lot to me. We could have gone pretty cynical, and almost did. But I find myself glad that we didn't.

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'The Haunting of Hill House' Creator Addresses the Show's Biggest Terrors and Twists

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This story contains spoilers for the first season of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House.] As Mike Flanagan worked on his take on the classic tale The Haunting of Hill House, he felt a specter looking over his shoulder: the ghost of Shirley Jackson.

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‘Doctor Sleep’ Filmmakers Tackling Hot Comic ‘Something is Killing the Children’ (Exclusive)

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Trevor Macy and Mike Flanagan are co-writing a pilot adapting the Boom! Studios horror hit for Netflix.

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Mike Flanagan is haunting us. Don't worry, the filmmaker is thankfully very much still among the world of the living. But he is haunting us through his cinematic storytelling. Over the past decade, Flanagan has displayed an intrinsic understanding of the link between horror and spirituality, the thrill, the beauty, and the romance, all of which speak to humankind's ability to believe, to find equal parts comfort and anxiety in the very thing Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) says at the end of the director's Doctor Sleep (2019): "We go on."

It's not merely the concepts of Flanagan's works that are fascinating, or that set him apart from contemporaries also swept up in all things paranormal, after all ghosts and theories of life after death are our most foundational elements of horror. But it's the way in which Flanagan commits to these elements operating across time and space that make his works feel transcendent within the genre space.

Time and space. Yes, it's a combination of words typically associated with science fiction, but without attempting (and failing) to pursue the Kip Thorne of it all, there is a thread of an idea there worth following from one genre to the other, from black holes to dark hallways. Flanagan's paranormal-centric works operate on the notion that what haunts his characters has always haunted them. Whether realized or not, their ghosts are as ingrained within them as their DNA. It's a personal and physical manifestation of their own life struggles, which may vary in severity, but are something no one can avoid. We all have struggles and thus we all have ghosts. These characters' arrival in a haunted space awakens what was already there and gives shape to the shapeless, a dark star being born out of life's unwanted dust and fragments.

Flanagan's hauntings don't feel like mere happenstance, but a peek at the organized and deliberate workings of the universe. It's time, space, and the existential underpinnings of the universe that Flanagan reckons with in Absentia (2011), Oculus (2013), Before I Wake (2016), Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Doctor Sleep, and his most recent project which forms the basis of this consideration of his filmography.

Last week, Flangan's latest project, The Haunting of Bly Manor was released on Netflix. Unlike the aforementioned works, Bly Manor doesn't solely feature Flanagan as a director. It's a collaborative effort that includes Ciaran Foy, Liam Gavin, Ben Howling, Yolanda Ramke, Axelle Carolyn, and E.L. Katz. Yet, it still feels steered by Flanagan and of a piece with his filmography, continuing to shed light on much of what haunted the halls and echoed though the history of his previous films. If The Haunting of Hill House was about who you live with, the ghosts in your head and the ghosts in your house, and ultimately reminding you to live, and live not alone, then The Haunting of Bly Manor is about memento mori, the ever-present ghost of yourself, remembering to die, and that life is not a possession but a journey that leads into the next.

Based primarily on Henry James' novella, The Turn of the Screw, and several other of James' ghost stories, Bly Manor follows a governess, Dani (Victoria Pedretti) who arrives to a storied estate to watch over two children, Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) and Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), odd and driven by stories of their own. Dani's care of the children, draws her into a larger mystery surrounding the death of her successor Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif) and her passionate love affair with the charming and dangerous Peter Quint ( Oliver Jackson-Cohen). What begins as a modernization of Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), also adapted from James' novella, becomes something else entirely. It is a love story, a gothic romance taken out of the cobwebs of the past and into the '80s in order to be told with an eye pointed towards the queer, and inter-racial truths of modern(ish) love, without sacrificing any of the emotional complexities or moral quagmires of 19th-century storytelling. The Haunting of Bly Manor isn't an exploration of what happens after we die, but what happens when we love, and we love so strongly that we are unable to leave, even if that means corrupting the innocence of the emotion.

The miniseries' mantra, "dead doesn't mean gone," is in some ways a perversion of Doctor Sleep's own mantra, "we go on." What ties Dani, Miles, Flora, Peter, and Rebecca together, alongside the equally important stories of Hannah (T'Nia Miller), Owen (Rahul Kohli), Jamie (Amelia Eve), and Henry (Henry Thomas), is a refusal to move on, and the inability for death to dissipate strongly held feelings. Even before considering the supernatural elements, these characters are trapped within the space of Bly Manor because of death, both literal and figurative. The death of a fiancé, the death of parents, the death of a marriage, the death of a mother, the death of a family, the death of a lover, and the death of a romance, all of these little deaths culminating in a death of self, again, both literal and figurative. The structure of the episodes, and the concept of being "tucked away," when the living consciousness is pushed into a memory while the consciousness of the dead take over the body, play with time in such a way that mourning never ends. By looking at these characters in terms of their past and present simultaneously, Flanagan and the filmmakers of Bly, expose the raw and unhealed wounds that exist within each of these individuals, slowly killing them, but killing all the same.

While it would perhaps make sense to say that Bly Manor becomes a place of death for its occupants, it's more accurate to acknowledge that Bly Manor was always a place of death. Bly Manor was always drawing these characters towards it, even before they experienced their first taste of tragedy. Their mortal wounds were written upon their souls even before they were born because time is no match for death. Bly Manor is a gravity well that devours time. The eighth episode, directed by Axelle Carolyn, is one of the most fascinating of the series. It gives a history and a face, albeit fleeting, to this field of gravity. Based off of James' "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," and taking its title from that story as well, the episode tells a centuries-old tale of a strong-willed woman, Viola (Kate Siegel), whose defiance against death, her insistence to not go on, is so strong that even when her body dies she remains on the grounds of Bly, and entraps all who die on the grounds there along with her.

Viola's hurt, rage, and loneliness are so powerful that even when her memory of who she is fades, along with her face, that her emotions still drive her, creating a habit, a well-worn path, that could only be stopped by the requited love of a daughter long dead and gone on. Unlike Doctor Sleep's Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), it's a love of someone else rather than a love of self that makes the idea of going on so frightening. The key to the eighth episode and Viola's plight is that it doesn't stand-alone, despite it introducing new characters and being presented in black and white. Rather it is the reason behind every strange occurrence at Bly Manor, and the episode's position near the end of the season only serves to showcase how unavoidable the fates of these characters always were because they had been in motion for centuries.

Despite the heaviness of all these themes working in tandem, Flanagan and his team manage to tie them up with a sense of hope rather than despair. That's not to say there isn't sadness to be found in The Haunting of Bly Manor 's conclusion. The romances of Dani and Jamie, Owen and Hannah, and Peter and Rebecca are all concluded by the death of one partner, as many romances ultimately are. That is a frightening inevitability along the same line as these characters always destined to arrive at Bly. But, as exemplified by Henry finding a new and different love within the lives of Miles and Flora, love doesn't dissipate, it doesn't die, or disappear, it's only changed and transferred. "Dead doesn't mean gone" doesn't have to be perverted in the way that Viola, and later Peter Quint twisted it. People die, and go on, but their love remains, and should they be so lucky, serves as an eternal reminder to others of love's worth and inability to be erased. To live fully, and to die fully, Flanagan suggests, is to leave behind a ghost of love, a ghost that doesn't seek to possess, or hold people down like gravity, but to move, unbound by time or space.

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How 'The Haunting of Bly Manor' Creator Mike Flanagan Plays with Time

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Mike Flanagan is haunting us. Don't worry, the filmmaker is thankfully very much still among the world of the living. But he is haunting us through his cinematic storytelling.