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‘It almost killed me': Horror maestro Mike Flanagan looks back at career-making hits from ‘Gerald's Game' to ‘Hill House' to ‘Life of Chuck'
The Life of Chuck is easily Mike Flanagan's least scary offering, which is interesting to note considering the new adaptation of Stephen King's novella is set around the pending apocalypse. What it is, however, is Flanagan's coziest and most gentle offering, which helps explain why the drama won the highly coveted People's Choice award at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival – and could ride a wave of strong reviews into this fall's Oscar race.
Prior to Chuck, of course, Flanagan has worked exclusively in the stuff of nightmares, becoming one of the horror's world's most revered writer-directors thanks to genre favorites on screens big (Oculus, Hush, Doctor Sleep) and small (Gerald's Game, The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass).
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In our latest edition of The Gold Standard, Flanagan looks back at 20-plus years of filmmaking, from his humble beginnings on the shoestring-budgeted debut Absentia to a horrific experience making Haunting of Hill House to his award-wining latest offering Chuck, whose cast includes Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, and Mark Hamill . He even picks his favorites.
Flanagan used crowdfunding to finance his $70,000 debut, a supernatural scarer about a pregnant woman (Courtney Bell) whose husband mysteriously reappears after a seven-year absence that was immediately embraced by horror sites like Fangoria.
So when I made when I made that one, I was working full time as a reality TV editor, and I was working a day and a night job to try to stay afloat in L.A. I'd lived in L.A. for eight years at that point, and had given myself five years to try to make something happen and get some traction, and it hadn't worked out. We used Kickstarter, which was still in its beta testing phase, it was brand new. And we shot it with available light on a Canon 5D Mark II in my apartment with a crew of eight people over two weeks. I remember feeling at the time, like one way or another that was either going to be my last movie, or it would kick something open. … It radically changed my life.
I don't think Absentia would have done anything like what it did without Fangoria. Fango ran a feature piece on it, and instantly drove the audience to it. I was incredibly lucky in that I found the horror community to be so welcoming and enthusiastic about not only Absentia, but it was the same with the Oculus short (2006) before that. That was kind of championed only by Bloody Disgusting and Dread Central and Fango, and that really made all of the difference. I don't think Oculus would have been able to go forward if not for the way the horror press and the horror blogs held up Absentia and kind of demanded attention on it. … There are few fandoms as connected and passionate as the horror fandom, and they'll carry you all the way home if you let them.
Flanagan was given a much more robust $4 million budget for his sophomore feature Oculus, starring Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites as adult siblings convinced that an antique mirror was responsible for the deaths that destroyed their childhoods. After premiering at TIFF, the Blumhouse and WWE-produced feature grossed $44 million. Flanagan also met his future wife Kate Siegel on the project.
I was terrified going into Oculus. I was excited. I still think of it as my first real movie. I didn't know what I didn't know. I was suffering from constant imposter syndrome, and this feeling like any second now, they'd look around and figure out I had no idea what I was doing, and I was making it up as I went — which I still feel to this day, frankly. But I remember it being a time of enormous anxiety, but also it was so thrilling. It was so exciting to be on a real set with a real crew and with the equipment. And I'm a huge fanboy, so Karen Gillan was right here and Katee Sackhoff was right there, and I'm a major Whovian and Battlestar fan. And so I was geeking out every day to be working with them. There was one ghost in particular, who really, really changed my life. I remember, at the wrap party, sitting down and talking to Kate kind of for the first time outside of that type of work. And talk about life-changing.
But yeah, Oculus for me was an incredible school. It was one of the most educational experiences of my life. And it kind of broke open this whole other level for me because it was released theatrically, which today I don't think it would have been. And Stephen King watched it and tweeted about it, and I about died. I mean, just completely, completely floored [by] that whole experience and going around doing the doing the press tour and going to the premieres overseas and seeing it with an audience, it was insane. There was a screening of it that WWE did where Hulk Hogan riled up the crowd and introduced the movie. It was bizarre. ... I still felt, though, that as quickly as that had happened, it could go away. And I better have another movie ready, another movie ready, another movie ready. Every one of those movies for that five -year period felt like this could be the last one.
Flanagan sure had some more movies ready. The filmmaker premiered THREE different movies in 2016: Blumhouse's Hush (about a mute woman terrorized in the woods), Before I Wake (starring Jacob Tremblay as a kid with some very problematic nightmares), and Ouija: Origin of Evil (the prequel to 2014's Ouija).
It's a little misleading because we shot Before I Wake before Oculus was released and because [its original distributor] Relativity went under, it was stuck in limbo for years. So really it was only Hush and Ouija that were back to back. And Before I Wake was released with them. But it would have been impossible to do all three in that time frame. But yeah, fortunately for me now, and unfortunately at the time, Relativity Media was going bankrupt and we had no idea, and so the movie didn't come out. But I had to be in prep on something new when I was in post on something, it was a compulsion and it was out of fear that whatever I just worked on was going to fail. And if I wasn't already working on a new thing, that would mean my career would just stop. And so I had to overlap them and keep it moving. And that was a panicked feeling I had that didn't let up for years. Like I was still feeling that way rolling into Doctor Sleep, like where it's like, 'Better keep going, better keep going.' Because if I stop and look down, I'm going to fall out of this career and it'll be over. And it took me a lot of years to finally look behind me and go, 'Oh no, I'm okay. I can go on vacation for a week and it's all right.' But it took a long time.
This buzzed-about Netflix thriller starring Carla Gugino as a woman whose husband dies while she's handcuffed to a bed in a remote cabin marked Flanagan's first collaboration with legendary scribe Stephen King, whose 1992 novel the film was based on.
He had tweeted about Oculus and that blew my mind. And then he tweeted about Hush. And at that point it was like, 'Can we do this?' And Gerald's Game was such a crazy project because no one had made it, and the book had been out for so long. I think the expectation on Steve's part was that no one was ever going to make it. And so between Oculus and Hush, that's what made him say, 'Yep, you can you can have it.' But back then, there was no communication with Steve at all. It was all [through] his agent, he gave me the rights. I sent the script out for approval. I heard that Steve had approved it, but I didn't actually communicate with Steve until after the movie was done. And when he saw the finished film, he sent me an email of his reaction to the movie. And I still have it framed in my office. But that was the first time we actually communicated. That movie also changed a lot of things for me because it didn't just start my relationship with Steve, but it also really propelled me [because] it was a Netflix original, and it really embedded me at Netflix in a very meaningful way.
Now tight with Netflix, Flanagan teamed with Amblin Entertainment and Paramount Television to land his first series on the streaming giant — an incredibly well-received fright fest about adult siblings reckoning with the haunted house of their childhood. It took a massive toll on the writer-director, however.
It's another case of I didn't know what I didn't know. I really wanted to get into television because I thought that was where some of the boldest storytelling was happening, and that you had time to really dig into character, which is my favorite part of what I do. Netflix was at a period of time in its evolution where they were really kind of defying the norms of the television industry and taking chances that other studios weren't, including taking a horror filmmaker who had never been involved with a TV show at all, and letting him be the showrunner and direct all 10 episodes of a show. That's crazy. And again, I don't think it would happen today. But Netflix was really cavalier back then about that. And so was I, because I didn't know what I didn't know. I had that same kind of defensive feeling where if this is my first foray into television, I have to empty the missile silos at it. I had to direct every episode because succeed or fail, I wanted it to be on my terms. It was as much about fear of it not going exactly as I wanted it to go as it was about anything else. And I learned an awful lot about television, about longform storytelling in a real crash course.
And it almost killed me. I lost 45 pounds during production. Over 100 days of straight production. No breaks. Weekends were spent in prep… I think I went five months without a single day off at one point. I really overdid it. But that's what it took to direct 10 episodes all block shot like a feature. I almost didn't survive it. And, yeah, it turned out to again be a project that radically changed my life and leveled me up in a serious way. But it came at an enormous cost with that one… It remains to this day the hardest and most brutal production experience I've ever had. And I didn't enjoy it. I [came] out of Hill House bleeding and never wanting to go back.
Flanagan did quickly return to television, however — multiple times. But he learned how to pace his himself and refine his approach on the Hill House follow-up Bly Manor, Midnight Mass (his Salem's Lot-esque thriller), Midnight Club (following eight haunted terminally ill young adults) and the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired Usher.
I got smarter about not trying to do it all. I only directed one episode of Bly Manor, and I was there for all of it. But I got much better at delegation, and I got much, much better at enlisting other filmmakers and giving them ownership over it as well. By the time Midnight Mass came around, I had kind of forgotten [the trouble of Hill House]. It's like childbirth. You forget. You forget the pain. And so by then I was like, 'I want to do all the episodes again. But it was only seven episodes, so that one didn't almost kill me. That was a wonderful experience. It was really hard, but I think that was the right amount. And then I would kind of modulate it. You know, I did two episodes of Midnight Club, I did four episodes of Usher. I got better at figuring out what a human workload was for me. And I got a lot better at embracing the collaborative nature of television and surrounding myself with people I trusted to shoulder a lot of that weight. And now I'm about to do my sixth series [King's Carrie], and I'm completely relaxed about it. I feel like I've I figured that out. But Hill House was a trial by fire. And I wasn't qualified. Today I would have been like, 'You want to be a showrunner, spend some time in a writers room first.' You want to direct all ten episodes of a series, you need to understand what that really means. You should maybe do half of that. And so I've learned a lot, but I kind of ran face first into that one. I wouldn't have the fortitude today to do it. I was also young enough that I was able to kind of hang on by my fingernails in a way I don't think I would be able to do today.
Flanagan has called Doctor Sleep one of the other most daunting experiences of his career because of how seriously he took the responsibility of bridging the gap between King's book The Shining and Stanley Kubrick's classic 1980 adaptation, which the author famously hated.
So with Doctor Sleep, I met Steve for the first time when I showed him the movie. We brought the finished movie to Bangor [Maine] and screened it for him before anyone else saw it. And I sat with him in an empty theater and watched Doctor Sleep. ... And I was terrified of his reaction, because I know how he feels about The Shining, but he loved the movie. And then after that, I'd say we became friends, we became friendly, and then we were in more regular contact. And I've seen him in person a bunch since then. And he came to the Chuck premiere, which is really neat. But after that we started texting back and forth and just kind of being in touch.
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The Flanagan-King pipeline continued with Chuck, which follows a terminally ill man (Hiddleston) in reverse-chronological three acts as he has deeply profound impacts on certain strangers that he meets.
The thing about The Life of Chuck that was so exciting for me, I read the novella back in April 2020. So right after the shutdown, I felt like the world was ending outside the window back then. And when I started reading it, I didn't think I could keep reading it. It hit so close to home. But I'm so glad I did, because by the end of the story, I was crying with joy and optimism and this incredibly surprising, gentle kind of reassurance that the story provided and I was looking back at my life in a whole different way. I shut the book and turned to Kate, and I said, 'If I get to make this, it's probably the best movie I'll ever get to make.' And I emailed Steve and kind of begged for the story. He had just given me the rights to The Dark Tower so he said, 'Not right now.' He likes to only have one thing at a time, so it doesn't slow anything down. And The Dark Tower proved to take a lot longer to get on its feet than we imagined. It's still happening, but it's taking its time. It's a juggernaut. And so there was time to do Chuck and I got to ask again a few years later. And he said, 'Are you sure? That's a strange one.' And I was like, 'That's why I like it.' And he let me run with it. And it's my favorite movie I've ever, ever worked on in my life. I know it's a major departure. But that's one of the reasons I loved it, and this was always meant to just be a little movie that I wanted to leave in the world for my kids when I'm gone.
In TV, the one that came most from the heart was Midnight Mass. And for my features, this is it. And I kind of feel like that feeling I've always had of, 'What if your career goes away? What if Hollywood doesn't want you anymore?' If that happens now … I'd be crushed, of course, but I'd walk away being like, 'I got to do Midnight Mass and Chuck. I'm good.' Those are those are my favorites.
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