You Can’t Scare Mike Flanagan. Can You?

Mike Flanagan built his reputation by freaking out audiences. With a string of horror hits on TV (Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher) and in film (most notably adaptations of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game), the writer-director also forged a lucrative career. He understands his lane — that his track record was a major factor in Amazon signing him to a choice overall deal and in Jason Blum partnering with Flanagan to revive the ailing Exorcist franchise — but he recently found himself feeling the pull to make something unexpected: a sentimental film with an extended dance sequence.

The Life of Chuck, his third King adaptation, services that impulse. But to deviate from his bankable genre and make an intimate character piece for stars Tom Hiddleston and Chiwetel Ejiofor, the 46-year-old filmmaker had to return to his indie roots. He quietly produced the feature in 2023 (with a strike waiver) under his new Red Room Pictures banner alongside Intrepid Pictures. It debuts Sept. 6 at the Toronto International Film Festival, where he’ll start courting distributors. “This is the movie I wanted to make for my kids to see,” says the father of three, who as a kid couldn’t stomach horror. 

A military brat, Flanagan got enough childhood scares from living in locales like Salem, Massachusetts, and a Civil War fort turned house on New York’s Governors Island. At the Glendale home he shares with his wife and frequent collaborator, actress Kate Siegel, inside a screening room designed to look like the ArcLight theater, Flanagan opened up about his road to horror, appeasing King and why his upcoming Exorcist update is the scariest thing he’s ever made. 

Your biggest successes have been in horror — which this movie is not. Did you feel you could only make it outside of the studio system?

Yeah, the industry just functions that way. I think Stephen King deals with that, even though he’s got Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile to his credit. This wasn’t a movie I thought people would see me as an obvious choice for, but I was so madly in love with the short story. Trying to explain that a Mike Flanagan movie based on a Stephen King book is not going to be remotely horrific … I’ll leave that to the distributor. 

After your run at Netflix, you moved your overall deal to Amazon — yet neither this nor The Exorcist is for either platform. That’s probably another move people aren’t expecting.

Fair enough. (Laughs). We have big stuff coming through Amazon, but this just fit in between. We were an interim-agreement movie during the strike. There was a period after we started filming where I think we were one of the only movies up in the United States. If we didn’t do it when we had, I don’t know if that chance would’ve come around again. 

Years often go by before a platform reaps content from an overall. What’s the lead time for your first Amazon project?

Our first project is a series that I’m running as my own show. Hopefully we announce it soon. I’m still learning Amazon, which does everything different than Netflix. It feels very deliberate, and a lot of their projects are supported in a way that I think our shows would benefit from. It’s a spooky show. Spooky is definitely the priority — and what I think they wanted us to come over for.

The Life of Chuck is your third Stephen King adaptation, and there’s a fourth [The Dark Tower] in the works. What’s the appeal in his body of work? 

I couldn’t watch horror movies as a kid. They scared me too much. To try to hang out with my peers, I thought I could read scary books to get braver. Stephen King was one of the first authors that I encountered, and I learned the hard way that it’s much scarier on the page. And, yes, the clowns and monsters are terrifying. But it only works because of his incredible humanistic care for the characters. He’s always been my hero as a writer. 

It’s odd to hear someone so synonymous with horror say that he was too scared to watch the genre growing up. When did it change? 

When It came out on ABC, all my friends had a slumber party to watch it — and I pretended to be sick so I could go home. My God, I was traumatized. But I found that if I could will myself to make it through a scary scene without covering my eyes, I was getting braver in controlled increments. That exercise afforded me something I could carry into my life — when I was scared of public speaking or talking to a girl. By college, I’d become difficult to scare. And by the time I wanted to make horror movies, it all started to look like the ones and zeros in The Matrix. I’m so ensconced in the mechanics of the genre, it is very rare that a movie affects me. 

What’s the last movie that did scare you? 

The last one that truly frightened me into getting up off of the couch was an Australian movie, Lake Mungo. It chilled me to the bone. There are others, like this French film Martyrs. There’s a lot of gore, but it’s gore with a point. I generally don’t love splatter.

King is a tricky client. He’s famously been displeased with adaptations of his work, but he seems to like yours. Talk to me a little about your rapport.

We brought Doctor Sleep to screen in Maine, and I sat next to him in his hometown theater in Bangor. I didn’t look at the screen at all. I just kept trying to subtly gauge any reaction. If he nodded, I thought, “Great, it’s working!” If he sighed or shifted, it was like, “Oh, he hates it!” And that was a long movie. Two and a half hours later, he leaned over and said, “You did a great job.” I just about died. Then he drove me to his house. We ate pizza and chatted in his library. He’s the nicest.

What are his notes like?

When we were doing The Life of Chuck, we talked a lot before production. He has an enormous amount of approvals on things like casting and other details. But when the movie goes, he stays very far away. He says, “The movie’s yours and the book is mine.”

You’re also tackling The Dark Tower, an infamously challenging series of books to adapt. How do you envision that looking — a series or a film?

That thing’s launching an oil tanker. But we’re working on. It was stalled first by me moving from Netflix to Amazon and stalled again by the strikes. It’s progressing, and we’re further along than we’ve ever been on it. I do see feature components to some of the other stories, but the main storyline is ongoing series.

Most of your Netflix series dropped before they adopted more viewership transparency. How did your performance reviews evolve? 

Hill House was well before they were disclosing stuff. Every bit of information we got was couched in a comparison to other shows: “It’s doing really well. We can’t tell you exactly how well, but it’s doing better than this popular title from a few years ago.” Is it doing better than this show? “Not quite that well!” It was a lot of talking around the data. Toward the end, that culture was changing and they were starting to share real numbers. The one I always really wanted all the details on was Midnight Mass. 

Do you like data or would you just prefer to focus on the work?

I want a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. I don’t want to get granular because one thing I’ve come to believe after some heartbreak is that time is the only thing that truly matters. I sat in an empty theater on opening night of Doctor Sleep — the 7:30 show at the ArcLight — and knew we were screwed. But Stephen King told me he was there when The Shining bombed and when Shawshank bombed. I’ve been happy to see Doctor Sleep, which was a very painful box office weekend for me, find its audience over the years on-demand and on streaming. 

Your Exorcist has been described as a “radical new take.” That’s a bold promise. Where does the confidence come from?

We aren’t making this easy on ourselves. (Laughs.) But I’ve always felt that there’s no point in going into a franchise or into a property that monolithic unless there’s something new you can bring. I chased The Exorcist very aggressively because I was convinced I had something that I could add. This is an opportunity to do something that I believe has never been done within the franchise — something that honors what came before it but isn’t built on nostalgia. I really just saw an opportunity to make the scariest movie I’ve ever made. I know expectations are high. No one’s more intimidated than I am.

What’s the one that got away?

I wrote a script for Stephen King’s Revival, one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, but it fell apart. That’s gone now because I have The Dark Tower. Stephen doesn’t like to have you sitting on more than one thing at a time. It means something’s not getting made. 

This story first appeared in the Sept. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.