The Haunting Could Get a Remake Again Mike Flanagan
Mike Flanagan Explores His Private Horrors in 'Midnight Mass'
In the new Netflix serial, the acclaimed adapter of works by Shirley Jackson and Stephen King tells a more than personal story.
Mike Flanagan's new series, "Midnight Mass," was inspired by his experiences with religion and addiction. Credit... Brad Torchia for The New York Times
The writer-director Mike Flanagan has become best known for his adaptations of works by Shirley Jackson ("The Haunting of Colina House"), Henry James ("The Haunting of Bly Manor") and Stephen King ("Gerald's Game," "Dr. Sleep"). The horrors in his latest project, "Midnight Mass," a seven-episode limited serial that premiered Friday on Netflix, are homegrown.
That includes the unease of being an writer, not adapter. "There's nowhere for me to hide now," Flanagan admitted in a recent video interview, speaking from Los Angeles. "Behind Stephen King is a keen place to hide. This is much more frightening."
Flanagan has earned a reputation for what might be called humanistic horror. Beyond the ghouls and goose bumps, much of his piece of work is centered on deeply felt family drama, populated by damaged characters wrestling with the everyday terrors of existence a parent, a partner, a human. "The Haunting of Colina House," his popular Netflix series from 2018, plays out similar "6 Feet Nether" with poltergeists.
Sometimes the endings of his shows and movies, which offer long-suffering characters a measure of peace, are derided past more sadomasochistic fans of the genre. But Flanagan, while never skimping on the nightmare fuel, believes that horror can offer something deeper.
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"Horror affords us the opportunity to really look at ourselves and the things that scare the states, that disturb united states of america, as a lodge and individuals," he said. "It's incredibly powerful."
"The Haunting of Hill House" was infused with Flanagan's own experiences with death in his extended family, including specific imagery from his life. Only "Midnight Mass," he said, is by far his most personal work — it is inspired past some of his about persistent fixations, every bit well every bit his experiences with religion and habit.
Information technology begins with a fellow and the aftermath of a terrible blow. After years in prison house looking for God — not merely in the Christian Bible but too in every holy text he can lay his hands on — Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) returns to his babyhood home on an isolated island to stay with his family. Before long afterward, following the arrival of a young, jeans-wearing priest (Hamish Linklater), foreign things offset happening. Some seem similar gifts from an all-loving God; others not and so much. Either manner, a college power appears to exist taking an active interest in worldly affairs.
That's right: Later having successfully taken on Jackson, James and King, Flanagan is taking on God.
At commencement glance, the tranquillity isle community of the bear witness seems far from the chilling mansions of "Haunting." In fact, "Midnight Mass" — which as well stars the "Haunting" actors Henry Thomas and Kate Siegel, Flanagan's wife — draws on many of the same preoccupations of that series in its interrogations of theology and faith.
"When you're talking most the afterlife and the soul, you're talking about ghosts," Flanagan said. "We can't assist but exist attracted to the thought that death isn't the end for us, and that we're going to come across the people we've lost once more. That thought is one of the things that interested me in horror in the starting time place, and is as much behind our religions as it is behind our horror fiction."
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He first pitched "Midnight Mass" every bit a boob tube show in 2014. "Everybody passed on it, including Netflix," he said. Before that, it had been an unfinished picture script, and before that an attempted novel. "Midnight Mass" appeared every bit a prop book in Flanagan's films "Hush" and "Gerald'due south Game," his own way of keeping the idea alive over the years. (He would tell curious crew members, "That's the all-time project I'll never make.")
Simply the show's origins go dorsum much farther. It reflects Flanagan'south experience when, after what he describes equally a healthy Catholic upbringing — including 12 years as an altar male child — he finally read the Bible, and felt the scales fall from his eyes.
"I was shocked, for the offset fourth dimension comprehending what a really strange volume it is," he said. "There were so many ideas I'd never heard before in church building, and the violence of the Old Testament God is terrifying! Slaughtering babies and drowning the globe! It really struck me that I didn't know my religion at that betoken."
Like Riley, Flanagan spent years studying various religions. Ultimately, the books that most spoke to him espoused atheism, rationalism and science — books by Samuel Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan. "I had more of a spiritual reaction from reading 'Pale Blue Dot' than I always had reading the Bible," Flanagan said.
"Midnight Mass" speaks to his connected interest in matters of faith, including faith in its nigh extreme form. "I'm fascinated past how our beliefs shape how nosotros treat each other," he said. "Looking at politics and the world today, so many of us are behaving based on the belief that God is on our side, and that God dislikes the same people we do."
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Some other of Flanagan's private horrors found its way into the prove: his struggle with alcoholism. "I come from a long line of drunken Irishmen," he said.
"But my biggest fright wasn't that I would die in a drunken motorcar accident," he continued. "Information technology was that I would kill someone else and live. That is the beating centre of 'Midnight Mass.'"
Flanagan himself spent much of his childhood on a weird little island. The family unit lived for a number of years on Governors Isle, in New York Harbor, where his father served two stints in the U.S. Coast Baby-sit.
It was a place that lent itself well to ghost stories and an agile imagination. Flanagan immersed himself in the immature-developed horror novels of John Bellairs, R.Fifty. Stine and Christopher Freeway, finally braving Stephen King'southward "It" in the fifth grade. Defying his mother'due south wishes, he later watched the ABC mini-series adaptation (1990) on VHS — a self-emboldening practise and the beginning of a lifelong obsession with Rex's work. In 6th course, he and his friends created a 20-minute film of "It" in the backyard. ("I've since apologized to Stephen for the unlicensed accommodation," Flanagan said.)
He studied flick at Towson University in Maryland, where he made a series of three talky movies about love and life on campus. "The ninety-minute episodes of 'Dawson's Creek' no ane asked for," he said.
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He knew he had found his calling, even if he hadn't quite found his genre. Moving to Los Angeles, he allowed himself v years to become his pes in the door as a feature filmmaker. 5 years went past — twice. He ultimately spent 12 years working as an editor, cutting together late-night car commercials and reality television. Sculpting sense out of piles of raw footage was a useful pedagogy, though Flanagan didn't e'er feel that way about it at the fourth dimension. (For the tape, he regards his work on "Jealous of My Boogie," a music video for "RuPaul'south Drag Race," as upward there with some of his best.)
Flanagan was all the same working as an editor while he directed his Kickstarter-funded characteristic motion picture, "Absentia" (2011), shooting on weekends with equipment borrowed from work. He was finally able to quit his solar day job partway through production of his follow-up characteristic, "Oculus" (2014). The two films were well received, merely they end on notes of despair that became much rarer in his piece of work.
A more hopeful view of the world found its way into his scripts after he quit the editing gig, became a parent and married Siegel. Flanagan began making the kind of horror that both chills the bones and makes you want to patch things upwardly with a family unit member afterward.
He has been sober for three years now. "I had people in my life tell me, 'If you drink enough, information technology's a different person that comes out, and he'due south pretty terrible.'" he said. "I finally hitting the point where I said if I don't alter this beliefs, I don't know what volition happen."
That change in trajectory might have something to do with how, for all its terrors, "Midnight Mass" conveys a religion in humanity and redemption. The newfound sobriety is also 1 of the reasons that, fifty-fifty afterward struggling then long to go "Midnight Mass" off the ground, he is relieved he didn't become to make information technology sooner. "I wasn't in a place where I could handle the material until now," he said, sounding grateful.
"I was writing about alcoholism but wasn't notwithstanding sober; I was writing about disbelief, but I hadn't gotten over my acrimony," he continued. "I've had some cute revelations."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/arts/television/midnight-mass-mike-flanagan.html
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