In the last decade, there hasn’t been a horror genre auteur with more general critical acclaim and prolific output than Mike Flanagan. Rising from a background in film and TV editing, he made his feature film debut in 2011 with the surprisingly well-executed Absentia, a shoestring horror mystery with a budget of only $70,000, which nevertheless required a modest Kickstarter drive to take it across the finish line. Roughly eight years later, the same guy is shepherding a $50 million production adapting Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, with a reputation as one of the brightest stars in the horror world.
But the oeuvre of Mike Flanagan is unique in the way it spreads itself across both feature films and the prestige streaming TV world, while simultaneously boasting a certain shared DNA of recurring performers, themes and editing techniques–a consequence of Flanagan exerting so much control as a writer-director-editor. This has given a cohesive idea to what “Mike Flanagan horror” tends to be all about: Lush and unabashedly emotional or philosophical horror stories, often with powerful female leads, and a focus on characters and dialogue over more traditional horror tropes. You might call him a horror romantic at heart.
With Flanagan’s final Netflix production, The Fall of the House of Usher now out and bringing all his favorite performers together once again, this seems like a perfect time to dive back through the director’s career in a retrospective ranking of all his film and TV projects to date. Future Flanagan projects for Amazon Studios may even include his long-awaited TV adaptation of The Dark Tower, so you can be sure we’ll update this list with every subsequent Flanagan property.
Here is every Mike Flanagan Movie and TV Series, ranked:
12. The Midnight Club, 2022
The Midnight Club was always likely destined to land at the bottom of this list, by simple virtue of the fact that the Netflix series was left sadly unresolved when it was canceled after its first season. Inspired by the collected fiction of author Christopher Pike, its framing device was that of a hospice for teenagers slowly dying of various terminal illnesses, contemplating death as they meet each night for a morbid custom of telling original scary stories, a la Are You Afraid of the Dark?. This was a concept with great potential on paper as a horror anthology with a wraparound mystery story revolving around the past/history of the hospice. In practice, however, we often found ourselves spending entirely too much time in the storytelling segments, skirting around the more intriguing main plot of what was really going on at Brightcliffe Hospice, which always seemed to be held at arm’s length. The series featured some absolutely outstanding key performances, particularly from Irish actress Ruth Codd as the acerbic Anya, but simultaneously highlighted some of Flanagan’s more troubling narrative pitfalls, such as a tendency to write characters (especially the teens here) as philosophically and emotionally astute to an almost comical degree that is difficult to accept as realistic. In general, the slow pace (it would have been his only two-season show) ended up calling an undesirable degree of attention to some of the director’s most frequently used contrivances. In the end, Flanagan went on to explain online how The Midnight Club would have concluded, but even with that information it will always feel notably incomplete.
11. Before I Wake, 2016
It’s difficult to know exactly what year to list for Before I Wake, which stands out as one of Flanagan’s most difficult productions, at least when it came time for distribution. Filming on the movie was complete by the end of 2013, but multiple delays of a planned theatrical release ultimately led to only a spate of international screenings in 2016. Finally, in early 2018 the film was acquired and released worldwide by Netflix, more than four years after filming ended.
This is an odd one: A movie marketed as a horror film, but one where it doesn’t necessarily feel like Flanagan really had any desire to make something “scary.” The story, about a young boy (Jacob Tremblay) whose dreams every night manifest themselves in reality, feels tonally somewhere in between the imagination of Guillermo del Toro, a Stephen King short story, or a vintage Twilight Zone episode. The true focus is meant to be the child’s foster parents (a warm Thomas Jane but somewhat wooden Kate Bosworth), and especially Mom’s temptation to use the boy’s gift as an opportunity to once again communicate with their deceased son, who died on her watch in a household accident. Together, they explore the ephemeral nature of dreams, and whether a physical reproduction of a person contains a spark of the divine.
It seems like what Flanagan wanted to craft was a heartfelt supernatural or dark fantasy drama — a film with the heft of something like Pan’s Labyrinth — but it simultaneously feels like he’s under orders to occasionally jam a more conventional piece of Hollywood-sanctioned horror into the otherwise maudlin proceedings. This manifests itself in some of the director’s least-effective jump scares, especially notable because he’s deployed some of the absolute best ones seen in recent years in the likes of The Haunting of Hill House. Before I Wake is technically sound, but it mostly lacks the scares and shock factor to satisfy the horror junkies, and the level of performance needed to sell its empathetic story about loss and parenting. The least realized of his feature films.
10. Absentia, 2011
Before he became Netflix’s go-to guy for horror, with projects such as Gerald’s Game and The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan completed his first feature, Absentia, which may very well be the best horror film you’ll ever see that raised its initial budget on Kickstarter. The film’s most notable achievement, though, is just how little it is constrained by the extremely meager budget–at least until the third act gets a bit overambitious. Still, Absentia is a really impressive piece of indie filmmaking, with steady direction and fantastic performances from actresses Courtney Bell and Katie Parker, the former playing a woman who is finally going through the steps of declaring her husband dead after he went missing seven years earlier. Only now, she seems to be seeing him everywhere she looks.
Part psychological thriller and part urban legend fantasy, Absentia hinges almost entirely on the skillful, naturalistic performances of its leads and a collection of well-timed, unexpected scares that are sprung on the viewer when you’re least expecting them. Only in the big finale does its reach exceed its grasp, which makes me wish that Flanagan could remake Absentia someday, complete with the modest budget it would require to flesh out the visual depiction of the story. Still, even as it remains today, Absentia is proof that you don’t need much money to make an effective horror film, as long as you have talent behind and in front of the camera.
9. Ouija: Origin of Evil, 2016
Of all the projects in Mike Flanagan’s career, Ouija: Origin of Evil feels the most on paper like him taking a purely mercenary directorial gig, especially given he was making a follow-up (in this case a prequel) to someone else’s film, the not particularly well-received Ouija from 2014. But as you might expect, Flanagan takes that assignment and runs with it, turning Origin of Evil into a family-driven story that better reflects his sensibilities, while surprising numerous critics who expressed no small amount of disbelief that the horror sequel was clearly superior to the movie it followed.
At its best, Ouija is a nice showcase for the realistic and supportive family dynamic between a single mother (an excellent Elizabeth Reaser, before Haunting of Hill House) who works as a fake spiritual medium, and her two precocious daughters (Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson) who assist in a task that Mom insists helps bring closure to paying clientele. The 1960s setting is well-utilized, and the script takes time to depict life’s small triumphs and catastrophes as an American teen of the era, like some kind of supernatural analogue to The Wonder Years. The ghostly focus revolving around the youngest daughter’s communication with the Other Side, meanwhile, can’t help but invoke the likes of Poltergeist, and the warmth of the central trio’s relationship contains a similarly Spielbergian flair. You root for these folks.
Though Origin of Evil does a nice job with its characters, and contains some engaging visuals–Flanagan’s repeated use of split diopter shots here gives it a fun, peculiar feel–the film can’t quite keep up the engagement once it fully transitions to what feels more like studio-mandated “BOO!” material in its third act. This more straightforward possession horror content at least feels less inorganically tacked on than the horror material does in Before I Wake, but the hastily revealed backstory of the family’s haunted house in particular feels like something coming from an entirely different film. As is often the case, Flanagan’s main interest lies in the family drama, and the balance between emotion and genre goodies he would later perfect in stories such as The Haunting of Hill House hasn’t fully rounded into form yet here.
8. Hush, 2016
Mike Flanagan likes to go big, to go ambitious, when it comes to his storytelling, simultaneously weaving in threads from the past, present and future to a narrative in search of these big moments of catharsis where the clues of a mystery satisfyingly fall into place. That tendency is what made Hush a welcome novelty when it arrived on Netflix in 2016: This film is not complicated, but refreshingly simple. It’s a classic home invasion story, complicated only by the fact that its protagonist (Flanagan’s now-wife Kate Siegel, in her first big starring role) Maddie is a deaf woman, a horror author who has chosen to isolate herself in the woods as she grapples with her work. That leaves her vulnerable when a mask-wearing assailant comes calling, and the sadist’s realization that she is deaf makes her a particularly tempting target for a little psychological torture. The audience is of course left hoping that this psychotic asshole is underestimating our heroine’s ingenuity and resourcefulness, and that she can engineer a way to survive her ordeal.
Siegel (who co-wrote the film with Flanagan) is quite good here, an impressively well-developed character considering that she never “speaks” a word, coming off as resourceful in a way that is grounded and realistic, never straying into MacGyver-esque nonsense. Flanagan geeks, meanwhile, will certainly enjoy the threads connecting this story and later Netflix series Midnight Mass. Other than the aural aspects, there’s not a ton in Hush that the genre hadn’t seen before, and its villain is perhaps less than totally competent, but that actually adds another layer of realism–he reads as a toxic misanthrope who watched Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers and then made an attempt to playact as a masked slasher killer. You could almost conceive Hush happening in our own reality as a result.
7. Gerald’s Game, 2017
Flanagan shows good promise as a steward of Stephen King’s fiction in the tidy Gerald’s Game, precisely because he displays an innate feeling for where he should streamline, condense and simplify even within the context of a story with very little actual “plot,” given that it occurs almost entirely within a single room. That room is a bedroom, where wife Jessie (Carla Gugino) lays handcuffed to the bed, trapped after her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) suddenly dies after revealing his secret sadomasochistic fantasies. One might think that this simple structure would be an invitation to translate King’s work as literally as possible, but Flanagan as a writer-director has a canny sense of what might work on the page but seem excessively quirky on the screen. He wisely chooses to ditch some of Jessie’s more complicated and strange moments of inner monologue, drilling in more tightly at the heart of the themes underneath this story of abuse, dependence and resurrection.
That leaves the execution of Gerald’s Game very much in the hands of two strong actors enjoying an unfettered celebration of their craft, and they both rise to the challenge. Gugino is entrancing as a woman forced to reckon with her long-buried trauma, complete with a final escape that is appropriately harrowing, but even better is Greenwood’s Gerald, who reappears to her throughout as a subtly malicious reminder of everything she’s been forced to give up in order to maintain a comfortable existence. The absolute best points in the film are the monologues of this specter, infecting his wife and impeding her progress with the slow, inexorable creep of self-doubt and nihilistic hopelessness. Gerald gives Jessie a formidable monolith to overcome, and although the film’s denouement and final scenes read somewhat strangely, their oddity is no fault of Flanagan’s–in truth, the weirdest material all comes from King’s own story. Flanagan just ably manages the feat of turning that story into a tight, overachieving little thriller.
6. The Haunting of Bly Manor, 2020
When is a horror story not a horror story? When is a ghost not a ghost? If a ghost lives, breathes and walks among the living, can that really be called anything other than life? If a ghost feels every bit as much love, fear and regret as a living person, then isn’t life just as fraught with peril as death?
These are a few of the roughly 10,000 questions that The Haunting of Bly Manor would like you to roll around in your head during its nine-hour runtime, in which it adapts Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw but simultaneously finds time to go down every narrative rabbit hole you might find on a sprawling English manor’s property. The follow-up to Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House is more unfocused than its predecessor, attempting to build an operatic narrative with detailed backstories for seemingly every character, but it possesses the same sort of devastating emotional intensity seen in the previous Netflix series. What it doesn’t have, though, is likely to disappoint a certain chunk of the audience: The scares.
In the end, what we have in Bly Manor is an epic, romantic gothic melodrama that isn’t interested in classical horror motifs like a struggle of good against evil. This is a deeply human story in which there’s no such thing as indiscriminate evil—only misunderstood and fractured people, both living and dead. Even the ghosts all become figures of sympathy and pity, as they’re revealed as products of misdirected human emotions such as rage, loneliness and loss, rather than the supernatural boogeymen we’re more familiar with.
5. Doctor Sleep, 2019
It seems safe to say that Flanagan’s skill in translating Gerald’s Game for Netflix likely landed him the opportunity to tackle a bigger, significantly more complex and ambitious Stephen King property destined for a wide theatrical release in the form of Doctor Sleep. This one had a particularly difficult task to live up to, thanks to its direct connection to King’s The Shining, which famously has a Kubrickian adaptation adored by cinematic aesthetes and disliked by the author, who never quite forgave Kubrick’s reinvention of his characters. Flanagan is therefore left walking a tightrope, paying deference to Kubrick’s iconic film even as he grapples with King’s long-awaited journey back into one of his most popular novels. And to his credit, Flanagan walks that line very deftly, writing Doctor Sleep as more of a direct sequel to the cinematic version of The Shining that audiences are more familiar with, while preserving King’s themes of healing and making peace with mortality.
This is a particularly well-cast film, leaning less heavily on Flanagan’s recurring stable of character actors than usual–though many do appear, and Alex Essoe is great in a rendition of Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance. Particularly excellent is Rebecca Ferguson’s delightfully devilish Rose the Hat as the leader of the True Knot, a sort of conclave of semi-immortal energy vampires who feed by killing people who possess the clairvoyant power we know as The Shining. She portrays Rose with a wonderfully caddish swagger, the sort of self-assured and unearned confidence endemic to perfectly hateable Stephen King villains, and it’s thrilling to watch her engage in a series of mental battles of psychic projection with young protagonist Abra (Kyliegh Curran). These are rendered with the most visual flair seen in any Mike Flanagan project to date, making Doctor Sleep feel like a particularly lush production that got the most out of its feature-length budget. This one should have done significantly bigger box office numbers than it did.
4. Oculus, 2013
In many ways, Mike Flanagan’s first wide-release feature film, Oculus, is still his most narratively satisfying, a truly original concept that encapsulates so many of the themes and conventions that would eventually come to typify his output as a writer-director. Looking at Oculus today, it feels like a training ground that would eventually yield the likes of The Haunting of Hill House in particular, but this film is much less grandiose than the likes of that Netflix series, opting for sheer creepiness, economy of characters and an inventive story structure. You could easily sum up its elevator pitch as a movie about “a haunted mirror,” which is the kind of high-concept simplifying that can get you meetings with Hollywood execs, but Flanagan’s greatest skill is his ability to take that kind of basic premise and then flesh it out with deeper characterization and narrative complexity than you’re expecting to receive as you plop yourself down in the theater seats. He underpromises, and overdelivers.
Indeed, the tidy feature-length runtime here actually feels like an asset, serving to focus some of Flanagan’s writerly tendencies to go long or convoluted when given the chance. We’re never given a full backstory for the evil “Lasser Glass,” nor is one actually needed. Its malevolence is plain to see; the last thing that is necessary is a tragic backstory in which doomed lovers killed themselves in front of it. It’s smart to frame our perception of the mirror exclusively through the experience and research of protagonist Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan, excellent), who feels it was to blame for the fracturing of her family a decade earlier. She approaches her task–more or less to take revenge on a haunted object, while clearing her brother’s name–with such rigorous aptitude and professionalism that we actually believe she can perhaps triumph over evil, before Oculus begins a series of increasingly mind-bending rug pulls.
One of the most persistent themes of Flanagan properties throughout his career has been the passage of time, and the collision of lives in a single shared space, in which the walls of linear storytelling melt away. Oculus threads together the past and present with skillful aplomb, acting as a template for much of the director’s future work, even as it delivers thrills and rumination, particularly in the wake of its shockingly bleak ending. Even with Flanagan’s Hollywood clout having grown much larger in the last decade, Oculus remains underrated today.
3. The Haunting of Hill House, 2018
The ideas first deftly explored in Oculus, Flanagan finally perfected in The Haunting of Hill House, a sprawling miniseries adapting Shirley Jackson’s classic novel into an epic family tragedy unfolding over the course of generations. Never is the director’s fascination with blending past and present better utilized than it is here, simultaneously employing timelines from childhood and adulthood to influence each other, while also demonstrating the unreliability of memory and emotion’s impact on our own perception. Standout performances from the likes of Elizabeth Reaser, Victoria Pedretti and Oliver Jackson-Cohen make this one of the strongest ensembles that Flanagan has assembled, while the director’s judicious use of scares both subtle and overt–including some of the best jump scares of the last few decades–never let you feel anywhere close to comfortable. It is, without a doubt, the most effectively “scary” of Flanagan’s works to date. As Paste movies editor Jacob Oller put it in an assessment of the project as a novel adaptation on Netflix:
The aesthetic of The Haunting of Hill House makes it work not only as horror TV, but also as a deft adaptation of Jackson’s novel. The monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump on the wall are off-screen, barely shown, or obscured by shadow. The series even goes back to some of the first film adaptation’s decisions, in terms of camera movement and shot design, in order to develop uneasiness and inconsistency. Well, maybe “inconsistency” is the wrong word. The only thing that feels truly inconsistent while watching it is your mind: You’re constantly wary of being tricked, but the construction of its scenes often gets you anyway. By embracing the squirm—and the time necessary to get us to squirm rather than jump—The Haunting of Hill House is great at creating troubling scenarios, and even better about letting us marinate in them.
2. The Fall of the House of Usher, 2023
Happily, if this really is the end for Mike Flanagan at Netflix, he’s certainly going out with a bang, bringing back upwards of 20 of the actors who have appeared in properties ranging from The Haunting of Hill House to Gerald’s Game, for a big, splashy and often completely unhinged ode to OG horror maestro Edgar Allan Poe. Episodes are freely littered with Poe references large and small, from character names to full-on poetry recitations—that this show is probably going to introduce so many people to “The City in the Sea” is a particular delight—and the series’ larger story reflects the author’s lifelong fascination with themes of guilt, death, paranoia, obsession and delusion. The Fall of the House of Usher technically follows the story of twins Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell). Here, however, the Ushers are a pair of ride-or-die siblings who have done almost everything together throughout their lives. They have survived a traumatic childhood, an abusive spell in the foster system, poverty, humiliation, and despair. They have lied, schemed, betrayed those who cared about them, and even done murder, all to earn their place together as heads of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, a gambit that has made them successful beyond their wildest dreams. One part horror-tinged Succession knockoff and one part modern day morality play, The Fall of the House of Usher is both a darkly comedic excoriation of the uber-rich and a slow-moving emotional car crash that explores the dysfunction at the heart of a family that’s losing its members one by one. But it is the fierce chemistry between Greenwood and McDonnell that grounds the story’s propulsive emotional center. Nothing about Usher works if you don’t believe in the unbreakable bond between Roderick and Madeline, or the pair’s bone-deep commitment to one another, for better or worse, and in betrayal or triumph. The Fall of the House of Usher is a horror story, and it’s one that feels a bit crueler and more traditional than some of Flanagan’s more recent efforts. (Likely because it’s paying homage to the man who created many of the tropes we still associate with this genre today.) But, although the series features no shortage of blood and gore—and several very disturbing animal deaths viewers who are sensitive to such things should watch out for—it is, much like his other works, about so much more than simple jump scares or overt violence. A story of the long tail impact of trauma, it is a darkly funny and emotionally rich tragedy that grounds itself in our universal longing for love and human connection. Maybe the Ushers are always fated to be doomed in every story, but Flanagan’s take on their fall is one that at least tries to ask who they might have been if they weren’t.–Lacy Baugher Milas
1. Midnight Mass, 2021
If The Haunting of Hill House is Flanagan’s most perfectly scary project to date, then Midnight Mass is the most emotionally resonant, the most beautifully characterized, the most achingly raw and relevant. You can feel that this one is a passion project, gifted with an immaculately creepy, deeply symbolic setting for its events to play out. The island town of Crockett, like so many other great horror locales, finds itself isolated not just from help but from hope and reason itself–spiritual isolation that the town’s enigmatic new priest promises to allay. But what if even the best-intentioned among us make a fatal flaw in how we interpret what we see in front of us? What if we allow our own faith to blind us, making ourselves an unwitting servant of forces that should have stayed buried? In a time when misinformation and polarization are rampant in American society, when large swathes of the population choose to willingly obfuscate reality to instead indulge in zealotry, the subtext of Midnight Mass is tragically powerful.
The series touches on so many fascinating themes: The madness of crowds, the abuse of spiritual authority, but simultaneously the human need for faith as a bastion of decency and strength to carry on through seemingly hopeless times. It manages to take one of the horror genre’s oldest tropes–we won’t name it here, for those who haven’t watched–and then envisions it within a context in which we’ve never seen it appear, making the idea seem entirely fresh and new once again. It’s the most thematically rich writing of Flanagan’s career.
And then there’s the incredible array of characters, featuring not only the best villain Flanagan has written, the toxically preening Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan), but the deeply sympathetic Father Paul Hill, portrayed with soul-emptying sincerity by Hamish Linklater. Any time he’s on screen, all else comes to a stop as the audience gets lost in Linklater’s empathetic performance, honesty tinged by faith that borders on manic delusion. So too does Midnight Mass contain the best performances that the likes of Kate Siegel and Zach Gilford have brought to multiple Flanagan projects, as if they could sense that this one simply meant more to the director and saved the best of their craft for him.
With any luck, we’ll look back a few decades from now on a few of Flanagan’s upcoming projects as contenders for magnum opus status, but today it remains Midnight Mass, the most bewitching mélange of everything he stands for as a writer and filmmaker.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s resident genre guru. You can follow him on Twitter for much more film content.