Whenever I teach Film Studies, I always get my students to discuss their favourite auteurs. Unsurprisingly, they always bring up the greats like Scorsese, Anderson (Wes and Paul Thomas, not so much Paul W.S.), and Hitchcock. Since most of my students avoid watching horror as a rule, they almost never consider Mike Flanagan. Which is a real shame, since there is no doubt in my mind that Flanagan belongs to this club of master filmmakers. Needless to say, I am always trying to convert them into Flanagan fans.
Like all auteurs, Flanagan has a recognizable signature style. Known for his lengthy monologues and recurring cast, he also gravitates towards certain themes, visuals, and motifs. Concepts like addiction and intergenerational trauma provide unifying threads across all of his work. Fittingly, like a p(o)erversed version of Disney’s House of Mouse, The Fall of the House of Usher (FOTHOU) is a celebration that brings Flanagan’s favourite people and ideas together under one condemned roof.
It may seem strange to start from what’s lacking when pinpointing Flanagan’s work as an auteur, but a clear lack of jump scares is a prominent aspect of his shows. Flanagan admits to being easily frightened, which is partly why he pursues horror – to exorcise his fears. Understandably, he’s never been keen on jump scares unless they serve a higher function for his narrative and characters.
Their very scarcity makes the few jump scares present in his stories so effective. Who can forget the heart-failure inducing moment in The Haunting of Hill House when Nell suddenly screams between her sisters as they’re driving? Ironically, for someone so averse to jump scares, Flanagan set a Guinness Book of World Records in The Midnight Club for the highest number of jump scares (twenty-one!) in an episode.
But as the character Spence observes, “That’s not scary. It’s just startling.” This record-setting achievement feels suspiciously like both career strategy and creator sarcasm on Flanagan’s part. He’s spoken of how network executives constantly pressure him to make things scarier. And after years of resistance, Flanagan finally gave them what they wanted, but as parody. Hopefully they’ll leave him alone for a while.
Now none of this means that Flanagan’s shows aren’t genuinely scary.
Let’s talk for a second about his penchant for gruesome hand injuries. In Doctor Sleep, the murderous Rose the Hat’s hand is mangled by a filing cabinet during a psychic battle against Abra Stone. In The Midnight Club, when Spence slices his hand open with a paper guillotine, it ignites a passionate defence for people with AIDS. And the hand injury par excellence is that insane degloving scene from Gerald’s Game.
There are plenty of visual callbacks to previous projects sprinkled throughout Flanagan’s shows. I particularly enjoyed the nod to Gerald’s Game in FOTHOU, when Carla Gugino’s character Verna appears with her arms spread casually over a bedpost. This recalls Jessie Burlingame, also played by Gugino, who was handcuffed to a bed in Gerald’s Game.
Another cool Easter egg is the recurring Lasser Glass, the cursed mirror from Oculus, one of Flanagan’s earliest films. The mirror hangs ominously in the Brightcliffe basement in The Midnight Club. It watches in silent judgement as Nell dances in The Haunting of Hill House. Its wooden frame forms the ornate bedpost that Jessie is chained to in Gerald’s Game. In my head canon, the Lasser Glass’s reality-warping powers explains its eerie, constant presence throughout the Flanaverse.
Thematically, Mike Flanagan has also explored memory loss across his projects. In The Midnight Club, Amesh awaits helplessly as his brain tumour steals his memories. In Midnight Mass, Monsignor Pruitt’s severe dementia causes him to mistake and embrace the creature he finds in a Jerusalem cave as an angel of the Lord. The Haunting of Bly Manor presents Flanagan’s most profound examination of memory loss by converging the show’s haunting with dementia, and time’s cruel erasure of one’s identity.
This is perhaps why storytellers are so prominent throughout Flanagan’s works. From Jamie telling a wedding party her tale of Bly Manor, to Roderick Usher confessing his life story, storytellers structure many of Flanagan’s narratives. As Olivia Crain reflects, “we’re all just stories.” Telling our stories is one way of reclaiming our lives from oblivion. Flanagan, a masterful storyteller himself, continues gifting us with beautiful and haunting stories.
In The Haunting of Bly Manor, Miles receives a letter telling him to come home. Nell finds a message on a wall in Hill House greeting her “welcome home.” For long-time fans, watching a new Mike Flanagan film or series – full of Easter eggs, familiar ideas, and the growing family of performers called the Flanafam – evokes the same pleasures of coming home.
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