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

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 Star Wars 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 Following, or Kevin Smith’s Clerks – 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.

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.

Oculus (2014)

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.

Flanagan’s scares and storytelling are equally effective here – Oculus 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.

Before I Wake (2016)

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 Room – 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.

If it’s not Flanagan’s most complete work, Before I Wake (which was produced under the much more poetic title Somnia) still has plenty of thoughtful ideas, memorable images, and touching performances – and most significantly, it continued his trajectory as a filmmaker clearly just as invested in emotional storytelling as he is in making things go bump in the night.

Hush (2016)

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.

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.

Maddie’s deafness also means that Hush is a largely dialogue-free experience, its establishing scenes mostly delivered in ASL before being driven almost entirely by action – every scene, every shot, conveys information, and nothing is wasted across its streamlined 80-minute runtime. Beyond anything, Hush proved that Flanagan could deliver supreme suspense, even without an underpinning of tragic family stories.

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.

Ouija: Origin Of Evil (2016)

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.

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 The Omen – 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.

Gerald’s Game (2017)

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.

Which only makes it more miraculous that Flanagan’s film decidedly is – within the confines of four walls and focused on a character who can’t leave them, he delivers major psychological excavation, nauseatingly visceral moments of violence, and some truly terrifying scares. Because as much as Gerald’s Game sounds like a survival thriller, it also boasts a nightmarish bogeyman in the Moonlight Man, a spectral figure who haunts Jessie while she’s unable to move.

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.

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.

The Haunting Of Hill House (2018)

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.

Because ultimately that’s what Hill House is – a grand family drama with added scares, tracing two timelines that excavate the strained bonds, fear, love, grief and frustrations of the Crains as they come to terms with loss. It is, of course, a full-on ghost story too with things that go bump in the night (and sometimes in the daytime too), and – in a genius touch – features all kinds of spectral figures hidden in the backgrounds of shots. It’s appropriate, because – as that title suggests – The Haunting Of Hill House is a series about people who are haunted in all senses, by their traumatic pasts, by their own fears, by the cracks that have crept into their relationships through the years.

Hill House isn’t just a ghost story – it’s a story about the nature of ghost stories, and of ghosts themselves too. The frights might not invoke nightmares in the horror-hardened (though one jump-scare in a car is an instant-classic), but the emotion is devastating – from the gut-wrenching revelation behind recurring spectre the ‘Bent Neck Lady’, to Luke’s struggles with addiction as he chases away his past, to the tragic inevitability of Olivia Crain’s descent into madness.

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.

Doctor Sleep (2019)

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.

The Haunting Of Bly Manor (2020)

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.

As such, Bly Manor itself has a softer, warmer feel than the chilly caverns of Hill House, and the scares are much less pronounced here – it’s a horror story through-and-through, but purely in the thematic sense, largely uninterested in jolts. And while the show is largely set in the ‘80s, its present-day framing narrative (double timeline – check), featuring the return of Flanagan favourite Carla Gugino, makes clear that it is, like Hill House, a series about storytelling and the passing on of ghost stories. It’s an idea that comes across most strongly in Episode 8 – a standalone(ish) story set apart from the contemporary narratives, shot entirely in black-and-white and with a sad, spooky plot that unlocks the mysteries of the whole season.

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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.