Mike Flanagan Quotes

Mike Flanagan

Profession : Director

Birth : May 20, 1978

I'm a firm believer that what you don't see is always scarier than what you do.

Mike Flanagan

I'm sure many more people saw 'Hush' in the first weekend it was on Netflix than saw 'Oculus' in theatres.

Mike Flanagan

What you don't want is for violence and gore to become more important than character and structure. A lot of slasher movies from the eighties were only focused on violence and gore, which robs the human beings in the story of any empathetic reaction from the audience, and instead makes them cheer for the gore.

Mike Flanagan

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.

Mike Flanagan

There's nothing scarier than silence. A lot of horror movies lean on hits and score to try and create tension, which actually does the opposite. The best scares come from a desire to see the character overcome what they're dealing with in the scene. If you care about the character you'll care about the scare.

Mike Flanagan

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.

Mike Flanagan

I have an allergy to sequels and remakes in general.

Mike Flanagan

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.

Mike Flanagan

We always try to leave room for the actors to come in and make discoveries on set, in their interpretation of the scene. The shot list is scaffolding.

Mike Flanagan

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.

Mike Flanagan

Depending on how 'Doctor Sleep' does, we'll see what movie opportunities there will be.

Mike Flanagan

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.

Mike Flanagan

I always tend to tilt dark on an ending, because I feel like, especially with horror movies, those are the endings that don't evaporate. Those are the ones that stick with you.

Mike Flanagan

Whenever you take a general meeting, inevitably you run out of things to talk about, they'd always say, 'What's your dream project?' I would always pull out 'Gerald's Game.' If they knew the book, they'd say, 'Well, that's unfilmable.' If they didn't know the book it would take about 30 seconds of my pitch to say, 'That's not a movie.'

Mike Flanagan

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.

Mike Flanagan

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.

Mike Flanagan

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

Mike Flanagan

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.'

Mike Flanagan

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.

Mike Flanagan

For me it's about creating and sustaining tension for as long as possible, and I'm not generally interested in allowing that tension to be deflated, especially by a jump scare.

Mike Flanagan