The Life of Chuck director Mike Flanagan spent years making movies and working in reality TV before he used a Kickstarter campaign to break through with the low-budget supernatural horror film Absentia in 2011. Its success enabled him to make his long-gestating 2013 hit Oculus, and then many more acclaimed works of horror.
But he didn’t just want to scare people.
“Shortly after Oculus, it occurred to me that someday my kids are gonna interrogate my work, and I asked myself, ‘What message are you leaving for them?’” he told MovieMaker. “A lot of my work started to change because of it. I was thrilled early on to just make scary stories with really dark endings, but the more I thought about my kids being exposed to hopeless stories, the more uncomfortable with that I became.”
Flanagan gained more and more acclaim with films like Hush, Before I Wake, Ouija: Origin of Evil, and two Stephen King adaptations, 2017’s Gerald’s Game and 2019’s Doctor Sleep. He also scored TV successes with five Netflix shows over the last seven years: The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and the Fall of the House of Usher.
Along the way, he says, he began to “prioritize telling stories that emphasize hope, empathy, and bravery.” His new film, The Life of Chuck, exemplifies those values while bringing along all the lessons he’s learned. Starring Tom Hiddleston, it’s another Stephen King adaptation — one that emphasizes humanity over horror.
“I think the world is a terrifying place, and I think my kids will experience horror and fear and anxiety on this planet in a way that is more intense than I did by the time they’re my age,” says Flanagan. “It’s really important for me that I tell scary stories, but I try to tell them in a way that will encourage the viewer and my kids, if they ever really dig into them, to find ways to be brave and to hold on to empathy and forgiveness and hope, even when things are dark and terrifying.”
For our latest Things I’ve Learned as a MovieMaker feature, Mike Flanagan talked with us about genre, learning from a RuPaul project, and success in sobriety. His thoughts are below.—M.M.
Mike Flanagan: Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker
1. Sci-fi is a question. Comedies are a balm. I had a conversation with Guillermo del Toro for Netflix where I said the horror genre is a “mirror,” and Guillermo added: “Hatred and fear are mirrors. Love is a window into another world.” I want to add some thoughts about genres. Sci-fi is a question. Sci-fi is pondering what could be or what might happen. Comedies are a balm. Comedies are a release and an escape.
2. The scare isn’t the point of a horror film. I think the scare is the least important thing and the scare tends to be the easiest thing. I used to believe the most important thing was putting someone face to face with something that really fundamentally frightens them, whether it’s the unknown or an uncomfortable fact about human nature — the monsters within and without. These days, I think the answer is more important than the scare. The way to deal with that horror is more important.
Also Read: Phantom of the Paradise Stage Musical in the Works (Exclusive)
3. Your greatest filmmaking lesson can come from anywhere: like editing a music video for RuPaul. I gave myself five years in Los Angeles to try to make something happen, and nine years later, it hadn’t. I was working full-time as a reality TV editor, but it turned out to be terrific skill-building.
I learned how to construct a story out of thin air and raw footage on a ridiculous timeline. I learned how to fabricate emotions or an arc even if something didn’t exist in my bins. And it made me better at everything. As a director, it made me capable of knowing what we need to capture so I have everything I need in the cutting room.
One of my favorite reality TV projects I got to work on was editing RuPaul’s video for “Jealous Of My Boogie.” The music video incorporated moments that rhymed with each other from that season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. And that’s a style of editing that I’ve maintained over the years. A lot of how you try to create a singular story that is meant to cover a long landscape of time — believe it or not — worked for that video and carried me over into Absentia and Oculus. That’s also some of the most fun I ever had editing, and now I’ve got the song stuck in my head again.
4. Film school isn’t necessary, but studying film is essential. I’ve seen movies people make with their phones that are riveting, and I’ve seen very expensive senior thesis films out of major film programs that aren’t quite working.
The more you understand what’s come before, the more you appreciate how this editing software on your computer or your phone evolved from a flatbed film editing suite, it only makes you better.
5. I find that coming up with a vision for a story can be pretty humbling. “Vision” is one of those words I think is really overused and thrown around in the industry. I think the actual idea of a vision for a project, in my opinion, is a very simple thing. It’s just as simple as what you can imagine — it’s just this waking dream, this imaginary light show that plays in your mind. To try to take that out of your brain and put it onto an external screen takes hundreds of people to synchronize with you.
It erupts naturally in your mind, and then the struggle is, how do you put it into words? How do you get it onto a page? How do you explain it to your director of photography? How do you explain it to your actors? And understanding that each one of them is going to bring something to it that you could never imagine.
That kind of beautiful harmony of all of these ideas and all of these visions makes for the symphony that is a movie or TV show.
6. Often, the solution to creative conflicts is something no one has considered. If there’s a profound disagreement or a profound lack of synchronicity between myself and a collaborator, it can be incredibly frustrating. It’s that feeling of, “Why don’t you see things the way I see them?”
It’s a fundamental human feeling. The amazing thing about collaborative art is that often the right answer is something neither of you has considered. If we’re really out of sync, maybe the solution is to step back and try to approach it together from a different perspective and find something that isn’t what we thought it was, rather than trying to talk the other person into our perspective.
I agree with Roger Ebert when he said movies are “a machine that generates empathy.” They create it in viewers. They can create it in their makers too.
7. Sobriety changed my life for the better. Including my work. Sobriety changed the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. It created an enormous well of patience and sympathy and empathy — for myself, for my characters, for my collaborators, for everyone — the audience included.
One of the biggest things I was worried about when I was in the throes of addiction and contemplating sobriety was this deep-rooted fear that I wouldn’t be able to write or direct or deliver a piece of work if alcohol wasn’t involved in some way. I was such a creature of ritual — the bottle of wine during long writing sessions, the after-work drinks with cast and crew, the camaraderie that created. There was a real panic in me that the quality of my work would suffer immediately if I removed alcohol — that alcohol made me more creative, more social, more dynamic, more energetic.
The exact opposite turned out to be true. I’ve never been more productive. I’ve never been happier with the quality of my work. I’ve never been better to work with than since I got sober.
The Life of Chuck is now in theaters, from NEON.
Main image: Mike Flanagan directs a scene in The Life of Chuck.