As Halloween lurches into view once again, the DC horror film Clayface sits atop the US box office. The grotesque chiller may be more notable for its co-writer, Mike Flanagan, than for anyone else involved in the picture, so synonymous has the 48-year-old become over the past decade or so with the kind of upmarket, literate horror, often adapted from the works of his idol Stephen King, that many believed had died a ghoulish death.
Yet Flanagan, who was originally meant to direct Clayface before moving on to other projects, occupies a unique space in modern Hollywood. He is a man who genuinely understands how to frighten audiences without giving in to cheap sensation or lashings of endless gore. If you want to be scared, go and see a Mike Flanagan picture, or watch one of his television shows. You can pretty much count on some sleepless nights.
Flanagan is a hugely prolific figure, in the manner of Guy Ritchie and Steven Soderbergh, which suggests he is a director who knows exactly what he wants. Since his mainstream breakthrough with 2018’s Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, which turned him from a respected but low-key independent horror filmmaker into a maestro of fear, he has directed, written or otherwise created a further three films and five television series, including the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep (2019), the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) and the King fantasy The Life of Chuck (2024). The last of these, a rare Flanagan flop, failed to connect with audiences; perhaps the spectacle of Tom Hiddleston dancing as the apocalypse loomed was anathema to those who prefer Flanagan’s usual witches’ brew of gothic horror and a decidedly 21st-century sensibility.
His latest triumph has been to adapt King’s first novel, Carrie, into an eight-episode television series for Prime Video, spinning the book’s unique blend of religious-themed horror and teenage angst into a bigger, arguably even more effective, chiller—and doing so with memories of Brian De Palma’s near-legendary 1976 adaptation of the novel still in audiences’ minds. What Flanagan has managed throughout his career is to take books and characters that his viewers might believe they know, then twist them in new and often terrifying directions.
Sometimes, he might be accused of going too far. Doctor Sleep was a half-effective, half-uneasy attempt at finding middle ground between King’s The Shining, the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of the book—which King famously detested—and adapting the author’s own sequel. If it was not wholly successful, then at least it offered some memorable chills and images, not least in the form of its villain, Rebecca Ferguson’s Rose the Hat. She has a scene in which she tortures a young boy that must be among the most disturbing and viscerally unpleasant moments in a mainstream American film in the past couple of decades.
Flanagan has yet to have a film that is a blockbuster on the scale of Zach Cregger’s Weapons or Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, from last year and this, but there is every chance that this will change when his The Exorcist: Martyrs opens in cinemas in March. On the evidence of its first trailer, released this month, the Scarlett Johansson vehicle looks as though it will be the first picture since the terrifying and underrated Exorcist III that will actually bring something new to the sub-genre, complete with Laurence Fishburne and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the men of God charged with sending something very, very nasty indeed back whence it came. It is typical of Flanagan that, faced with IP that many other filmmakers have either failed to get to grips with (hello, David Gordon Green) or reduced to mad exercise in deranged auteurism (that’s you, John Boorman), he has gone full throttle into producing something original and exciting.
As someone who generally dislikes horror films and will go and see about one a year, if that, I am intrigued by Flanagan as a one-man phenomenon. You could liken him to Ryan Murphy, another auteur of small and big screens who has a loyal rep company of actors and the creative freedom to make shows that no one else would be allowed near.
But perhaps a better comparison is with Kevin Feige, the baseball cap-sporting Marvel supremo. While Flanagan has not yet come up with an Avengers-level combination of horrors that will bridge the various universes he is creating, he’s certainly nodding towards that with his various Stephen King adaptations. It’s already been suggested that his Carrie show will run for three seasons—taking it beyond the very final ending of the book. And then there is the prospect of his long-mooted adaptation of The Dark Tower, the great, sprawling King epic, the one that brings everything together.
Either way, we can be thankful that there is someone with the chutzpah, daring and willingness to think big in an industry that is often, ironically enough, frightened to do so. And all while making our flesh creep. Happy Halloween, Mike Flanagan.
