Welcome to the world of Mike Flanagan — a place where your wildest dreams and most terrifying nightmares can come true. Sounds fun, right? Whether it’s spooky season or you’re simply looking for a few scares on a random Tuesday night (zero judgment here), you can’t go wrong with diving into the king of modern horror’s canon. Over the years, Flanagan and his now-quite-familiar troupe of actors have made some of the scariest and most unexpectedly heartfelt horror shows and movies out there. Not sure where to start — or what to revisit? Here are eight hair-raising options for you to choose from. Pick your poison, claim your haunted house, and hit play if you dare.
Since Flanagan is so adept at handing out nightmares, it feels right for him to have an entire film about them, doesn’t it? Before I Wake stars Kate Bosworth (The I-Land) and Thomas Jane (Hot Summer Nights) as grieving parents Jessie and Mark, who foster a boy named Cody (Jacob Tremblay) after the tragic death of their young son, Sean (Antonio Evan Romero). It doesn’t take long for Jessie and Mark to realize that Cody has a special gift — or a terrible curse, depending on how you look at it. Cody’s dreams come to life. This, of course, means that his nightmares do, too. The big question is whether Jessie and Mark can handle the huge responsibility — and just how much they’re willing to abuse it in order to satisfy their own grief.
Flanagan takes on Gothic horror icon Edgar Allan Poe in this eight-episode limited series. The spine-tingling action pulls characters and themes from Poe’s work and gives them a modern spin while following the trials and tragedies of the ultra-wealthy Usher family. Siblings Roderick (played by Bruce Greenwood in the present day and Zach Gilford in flashbacks) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell and Willa Fitzgerald, respectively) have spent their lives building their pharmaceutical empire into an unprecedented success, regardless of who got hurt along the way. So when Roderick’s disparate children — the company’s heirs — begin to die one by one in increasingly fantastic ways at the hands of a mysterious woman (Carla Gugino) from their youth, the siblings are forced to look back at the path that led them to their horrifying present. Mark Hamill (The Sandman) and Carl Lumbly (Obliterated) also star.
This adaptation of the 1992 Stephen King novel of the same name co-stars two Flanagan mainstays, Gugino and Greenwood. They play Jessie and Gerald, a couple that heads to their remote lake house for what’s supposed to be a romantic getaway. Their marriage is on the rocks, and they’re hoping some intimate alone time will do them some good. But the simple vacation turns into a complete nightmare for Jessie when Gerald handcuffs his wife to the bed and attempts to enact a sexual assault fantasy. Things only get worse from there: Gerald has a heart attack and dies on top of her, leaving her trapped. It doesn’t take long for Jessie to become consumed by repressed memories and vivid hallucinations. She begins to question what’s real as she fights for survival — and considers making a truly gruesome escape attempt.
This is, first and foremost, a love story. Flanagan’s loose adaptation of Henry James’s work — most notably 1898’s The Turn of the Screw — is a dark, romantic tale that follows Dani (Victoria Pedretti), a teacher in ’80s London who is hired by the wealthy Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) as an au pair for his orphaned niece and nephew (Amelie Bea Smith and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). Dani’s story is narrated by a mysterious woman (Gugino), who warns of the potential heartbreak to come. After arriving at the hauntingly beautiful country estate Bly Manor, Dani begins to experience strange events and see unexplained apparitions as she unearths the house’s history, befriends the other workers, and meets an intriguing gardener. Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Lost Daughter), Amelia Eve (Leopard Skin), T’Nia Miller (The Fall of the House of Usher), and Rahul Kohli (Midnight Mass) also star.
What’s more terrifying than family? Take the Crains, for example, who are introduced over two timelines in The Haunting of Hill House, based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel. In the first timeline, the young family moves into Hill House while parents Hugh (Thomas) and Olivia (Gugino) renovate the stately old mansion. But the longer they stay there, the weirder things get, until one tragic night changes everything. In the second timeline, over 20 years later, the five adult Crain siblings –– all clearly traumatized by their time at Hill House –– reunite with their estranged father (now played by Timothy Hutton) after a second tragedy. It’s full of ghosts, jump scares, and extremely complicated, wildly compelling sibling dynamics. And while the entire series is a must-watch in the Flanagan oeuvre, be warned that once you meet the Bent-Neck Lady, you might never recover.
Death is inevitable, but it’s not necessarily the end in this thriller series created by Flanagan and Leah Fong. Set in 1994, The Midnight Club follows a group of terminally ill teens living at Brightcliffe Hospice Care. Every night, the teens gather at midnight to tell ghost stories. They also have a pact: When one of them dies, they have to try to reach out from beyond the grave to those they left behind in the hopes of proving there’s something after death. When the group finally starts seeing ghosts and other supernatural creepy-crawlies, they realize that one of them may have fulfilled the pact from beyond the grave — but they may also not be very friendly. Iman Benson (#blackAF), Ruth Codd (The Fall of the House of Usher), Annarah Cymone (Midnight Mass), Chris Sumpter (Goosebumps), and Sauriyan Sapkota (The Life of Chuck) star.
Crockett Island is home to 127 souls, all of whom can’t help but whisper when Riley (Gilford) — who left their isolated community behind years ago to become a venture capitalist — returns after serving four years in prison for a drunk driving accident. Simultaneously, a charismatic new priest, Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater), arrives on the island. Father Hill claims that their regular priest, the elderly Monsignor Pruitt (also Linklater), is on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But mysterious events soon befall the island, and all hell breaks loose — in more than one sense of the phrase. The town’s mistrustful residents begin to point fingers at anyone they deem an outsider, and Father Hill seems to relish the discord more than a proper priest should. Flanagan’s Gothic supernatural horror miniseries also stars Kohli, Kate Siegel (Hypnotic), Kristin Lehman (Heartland), and Samantha Sloyan (Hush).
Family trauma themes abound in Flanagan’s work, and Oculus (based on the director’s short film Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man with the Plan) fits snugly into that mold. Karen Gillan (Gunpowder Milkshake) and Brenton Thwaites (Titans) co-star as siblings Kaylie and Tim, who claimed to witness unearthly horrors while growing up in their suburban home. When both of their parents die, Tim lands in a psychiatric hospital, where the doctors eventually convince him that there was nothing supernatural about his experiences. But Kaylie is determined to prove that their suffering was real. She hunts down the chilling antique mirror that she blames for their family’s misfortune and, upon Tim’s release from the hospital, reveals her plan: Whatever thing lives inside that mirror is going to reveal itself — and it’s going to pay for what it did to their family.
