Midnight Club and Midnight Mass’ Mike Flanagan is now a horror master

If you watch enough — or even just a few — Mike Flanagan productions, you’re bound to see some familiar faces. Flanagan is moving from one of his thrilling horror universes to the next, and a number of cast members follow along, changing roles as Flanagan goes from a father or teacher who has strayed or from a wife to an ex-wife to a religious fanatic. It is not uncommon for Hollywood directors to have great ideas and good working relationships with actors.

But it’s also indicative of Flanagan’s relationship to his own work: Watch enough (or even just a few) Flanagan projects and you’ll see the way he winds back to the same structures and themes, shoring them up and getting more confident with each pass. It’s no surprise that over the course of his career he’s become one of the great interpolators of our time, remixing horror classics with his own distinct spin and leaving a bit of his own spirit everywhere he goes. With each new work, you can see him not only working out those ideas, but digging deeper; where they were once the set dressing for his house of horrors, they’re now the core of what makes it all tick.

Flanagan can be felt from the jump, his hands on the steering wheel. Flanagan is fond of openings that put you in the moment. It, whether you understand what “it” is or not. AbsentiaThe Kickstarter-funded, first feature of full length, ‘The Walking Tunnel’, is a haunting and somber glimpse into a pedestrian tunnel. We are taken to a place of insanity as the title card fades away. This is As Midnight MassIt starts by holding on to an ichthys-decal that captured the police lights following a drunken driving incident. This sets the tone quickly. Mass’ exploration of the passiveness of modern Christian faith, an immediate dilution of its values repeated with glimpses of religious trinkets in the establishing shots around Crockett Island. Compare this to the depth of Midnight Mass’ openingAbsentia’s detail is more of a glance than a promise; an unpolished neon sign to evil rather than an evocative car light.

Sometimes these details will be the most important in retrospect. Haunting of Hill HouseThe first half of the season features confidently dancing through perspectives and timelines. The ghost-story structure is compelling because of how it creates its characters and the familial relationships they have through the impressions from others. Just like every family is unhappy in its own way, each haunting — be it a ghost or family memory — is reflected in a different way through each of the children. What could be a bug becomes a feature: Steven’s childhood home was not the same place as Nell’s.

Photo: Steve Dietl/Netflix

You don’t have to wait too long for Flanagan to clue you in. One of his best-known traits is Flanagan’s monologue. It is a powerful form of self-definition, so strong that it can even be feared. HushA movie about a woman deafened and mute who fights off a serial murderer is called “Escape”. It’s a tic you’ll see his characters fall into all over the place, from Midnight MassAll the way back Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man With the Plan. This would make the short a reality. OculusIn 2013, the film starred Brenton Thwaites and Karen Gillan as their two older siblings, who struggle to overcome the ghostly antique mirror that has destroyed their lives. But in its early form (so named because it was planned as a single entry in a series about the mirror), it’s a one-man show, a monologue descending into madness as one man squares off with the cursed mirror. In the years since, Flanagan’s films and TV shows have strayed away from such solo performances, but you’ll still catch his characters explaining things to themselves, or going long at almost every opportunity (Haunting of Bly ManorIt begins with two monologue speeches, which are delivered back-to-back by distinct characters.

There’s a sense Flanagan shares some of the same impulses as his characters in this respect. Perhaps Flanagan’s most striking feature is the appearance of miniatures in many Flanagan joints. This could be one way he imitates his work onscreen. His protagonists are very interested in control — over their electronic devices, their narratives, and over life (or death) itself. In a similar way, Flanagan’s scripts often over-enunciate so he’s not misunderstood: Hill House’s final episode underlines the show’s themes around loss a little too forcefully; Midnight MassSlows down to allow two characters to talk long and deeply about faith and what the afterlife means.

These stories are about people who, despite being naturally logical and able to think rationally, are suddenly pulled into situations and emotions that are beyond their control. They have to balance both sides. It’s not hard to see how someone like Flanagan, who has spoken and written about his issues with alcohol abuse, might be drawn to stories that make something orderly out of a gnawing void of swirling emotions. Like Flanagan, his characters seem to crave a structure to what they’re seeing, a way to make sense of the yawning horrors that have reshaped what they know about the world.

Image by Netflix

And yet, for as much as these monologues certainly give you a bright red arrow to what he’s trying to say, they free him from the usual horror explanations of how we’re seeing all this. History is both in his OculusThe mirror’s evil nature is not something he ever says in movies. He can understand what happens to your life after it is rocked and roiled by this eldritch terror, but he doesn’t attempt to answer the question. He accepts that the ghosted malignancies and other horrors in his life are part of normal human behavior.

In Flanagan’s work, hauntings are often already literal far before they are actualized with a ghost or a demon. The boundaries between what is an actual spiritual presence and what is merely the resonance of some deeper emotion — most often grief, guilt, or sorrow — is just as delicate as the veil between our world and the next. You’ll certainly see this in his supernatural works, how houses become barely malevolent conduits that trap ghosts within them. Yet, he is still fascinated with the how. All thingsEven if they are not supernatural, hauntings can be interpreted as memories or manifestations. Jessie (Kate Bosworth), touches her new tub guardrails. Before I Wake, she gets flashes of her son’s hand flailing in its absence, casting about for something to save him from drowning. As Absentia’s Tricia (Courtney Bell) tries to pack up her missing husband’s belongings, she starts to see him as an apparition far before she understands the danger lurking outside her door. Und in Gerald’s GameAfter her husband’s death, the wife was left with handcuffs on the bed. She finds herself haunted and haunted, by the ghosts of loved ones she knows.

These hauntings are the point of what Flanagan is doing here; he’s a horror guy. But in his hands they provide a remove, an ability for characters to refine, process, explore, and experience what they’re missing. It’s part and parcel with his routine use of dreams and lucid dreaming (and even sleep paralysis as haunting) — a window into another, warped world that lets us see our own more clearly.

Perhaps that’s why so many of his stories entwine perspectives of children and adults. The first thing you notice is it. OculusWhere it was created out of necessity. As he told MoviesOnline in a 2015 interview, “Especially dealing with a monster that’s an inanimate object, it’s the only way you can sustain tension over a long period of time, which was a big concern coming off the short. At that point, I felt we’d pushed the envelope. It was interesting for a half hour, but how were we going to triple that?” And so Tim Russell gets a sister, and OculusTrades in Oculus: Chapter 3’s interest in filtering reality through detached screens in favor of a timeline braiding the present (the two children trying to fight the mirror) and the past (the mirror first entering their family home 11 years prior). This is a clever way to combine the two stories and make it work. Tim and Kaylie are able to get much more than they anticipated. But they also receive some perspective through a session of supernatural exposure therapy. It allows them to understand their past (and the dark side of the mirror).

From there, Flanagan returns to this structure repeatedly, teasing out new ways into — and out of — telling stories across time. Flanagan’s films explore the conflicting currents of violence and horror as its own generational trauma in a more direct way. Doctor Sleep lets Danny Torrance reframe his own youthful trauma as he cares for a young girl who’s also developed the shining; Before I WakeThe topic of supernatural gifts and parent-child grief can be complicated. Our heroes are: Gerald’s Game Or Ouija: The Origin of EvilThey are forced, each in their own ways, to assess what children owe adults.

But it’s television that’s given Flanagan room to shake up and settle into a more formal style, particularly as it comes to portraying the child and adult perspectives on horror. You can find both. Hill House Bly ManorFlanagan filters hauntings using the stories of children and adults, giving each the opportunity to express themselves and tell their story. Hill HouseParticularly, it feels more mature than the younger version. OculusAs it unravels the secrets of a family over several episodes, and adds a little more to its punch at coming of age, It is a while Oculusmust work hard in order to find the perfect mirror at the end of their dual stories. Hill HouseWith remarkable clarity, it establishes the 13 main characters with young and old actors. There are also a few timelines. It turns its use of time and viewpoint into a strength, coloring everyone’s stories through the lens of those around them, inspiring a dimension to the season beyond just what’s on screen.

Hill House It’s far from perfect. But it’s as clear a case study as you’ll get that Flanagan is just more confident with time, and deservedly so. You can see this in the growing self-awareness laced into his stories — whether it’s the fake cigarette burns, split diopter, or ShineInspiring patterned curtains Ouija: The Origin of EvilThese exist as reminders of the artifice and the dangers of the world. The Midnight ClubHis latest Netflix series is titled “The Last of the Wild”.

Flanagan’s stories are more solidly constructed because of this self-assurance. Early Flanagan works are littered with elements that invoke deeper meanings as set dressing, but those elements don’t do much more than simply exist (the in-film explanation as to why Hush’s protagonist is mute asks more questions than it answers). They’re in these worlds shallowly and undermine the structure of the horror, often leaving both sides feeling too distanced from each other.

But his later works — particularly Midnight Mass and the director’s cut of Doctor Sleep — don’t let the horror feel ancillary at all. They’re family dramas asHorror, they’re as complex as they are terrifying. Danny’s compartmentalized journey through Doctor Sleep is only possible through the paranormal elements, and his curative revelations (and, yes, even the monologues that underpin the whole thing) are so sound because it’s all intertwined with his understanding of the supernatural forces preying on our world. Midnight Mass’ central analogy is almost too obvious at first. As the series continues, he discovers the personal terror and reactions in nearly every Crockett Island citizen. This speaks volumes about how much care he gave to the institution that he was part of.

It’s almost odd, then, that Flanagan got to create what he calls his “most personal” work smack in the middle of a series of interpolations as adaptations (Doctor Sleep, Gerald’s Game, Hill House, Bly Manor, The Midnight ClubAnd the future The House of Usher is in decline). These alterations are often so far removed from the original material, they can only be tangentially relate. It is a total change of character and motives. It’d be just as easy to do a regular haunted house as more of an homage, or simply rejigger the Is the Dark Afraid Of You?These concepts are his guide Midnight Club adaptation. But this many years in, it’s become clear that is part of the fun for him, and part of the beauty for his audience: He’s getting better at shining a light to bring out new facets of the work, using his own natural interests and style to pull interesting things out of the piece. He is able to create something completely new and unrelated as his projects grow bolder. There, evil isn’t just bad or spooky, it’s emotionally scarring. This far into the game, he has finally had time to get that out.