Top 30 Mike Flanagan Quotes

I’m a major NASA nerd, so I’ve spent a lot of time learning about the space race and the Apollo missions.

When I first started out and would go on pitch meetings, there was always this kind of eye-roll that would come with pitching a horror movie when you were dealing with the studios. Unless it was viewed as a cheap product that could turn a lot of profit, there wasn’t a lot of interest in making it good.

I tend to over-prepare my shot lists.

I have an allergy to sequels and remakes in general.

I did not growing up watching a lot of horror. I wasn’t allowed a lot of it and I was a real chicken.

At home, people are more likely to be distracted than in a theatrical environment. They’re checking their phones, pausing to get a snack, or sometimes jumping from show to show.

I started off making backyard movies. I think it began in fifth grade – I’d get the friends together and we’d make little home movies. I always wanted to make movies but I didn’t know how. It was always something really fun to do.

What’s so exciting and unstoppable about the horror genre is that I view it all as metaphorical exploration. It’s the safe place that we, as a culture, can deal with things that upset and frighten us – the darker side of our nature.

I’m always drawn toward family drama, and dysfunctional family stories. It speaks to me, in a really profound way, and I think there’s so much to explore within it.

Audiences have grown to equate being startled with being scared, and will complain that a movie ‘isn’t scary enough’ if it doesn’t have enough jump scares… so that means that a lot of studios will insist on shoving jump scares into a movie, regardless of character or story structure, thinking it ‘makes it scarier.’

Well, as a kid I did all the Bloody Mary games and using a mirror to scare yourself.

Audiences are embracing more and more unique material. I think they can sense the cynicism when people are just cranking something out to try to ride off the success of something else. I think they can feel it.

For me, ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ is a series about life after a haunting, what happens after the credits roll in most horror films.

A movie studio has to answer to a marketing department, and to shareholders, to ensure the broadest audience possible for its product; it tends to err on the side of caution as a result.

When horror is about something – capital-A about – that’s when it’s really landing.

I do not have the female experience. I don’t, and I strive to understand it, but I’ll never truly be able to. I don’t think any men will, really.

I hate jump scares. I really hate them. I think there’s nothing special about being able to startle someone – that’s an involuntary reflex, and it makes people laugh.

Gerald’s Game’ had such an impact on me when I read the book in college that I think I’ve actually, consciously or unconsciously, been incorporating elements of that story into my work ever since.

I always liked the challenge of that, how to take an inanimate object and build something around it that’s scary.

I never shoot my movies like I’m shooting ‘a horror movie,’ I shoot them like dramas. Dramas and then something horrible happens.

Gerald’s Game,’ we could not have made it at a studio without substantive changes to the story.

Well, I’m always drawn to the drama first. A story is really only interesting to me, if you can remove all of the genre moments and remove the supernatural element, and it still works. Then, I’m interested.

I’ve always been fascinated with the ’60s in general.

Well when I hear ‘slasher’ I think about the 80s.

It’s a wonderful thing to watch an actor just act.

I saw ‘The Shining’ in eighth grade. I watched it on VHS at a sleepover and was petrified, totally petrified. And I didn’t really start to digest the movie properly and understand it from a filmmaking perspective until I got older. But it pretty much defined what it meant to be scared of a movie for me.

Midnight Mass’ is kind of my baby; I’ve been working on that for six years. I started writing it while ‘Oculus’ was in preproduction, and it’s a very personal, scary little story.

Horror movies feel like comedies when you’re making them because everybody laughs so much.

Thanks to ‘It,’ you’re going to see the studios take a lot more chances on a very specific vision. An R-rated horror film about children being eaten by a monster that lives in a sewer is not normally something that a studio would throw their weight behind. But we’ve seen the success of it, which props everyone up.

A viewer’s imagination is a powerful storyteller, and can often come up with things way more frightening than what you can explicitly show in a horror movie… try to engage that imagination, and the results can be magical.