Well when I hear 'slasher' I think about the 80s.
— Mike Flanagan
At home, people are more likely to be distracted than in a theatrical environment. They're checking their phones, pausing to get a snack, or sometimes jumping from show to show.
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.
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.
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.
Depending on how 'Doctor Sleep' does, we'll see what movie opportunities there will be.
I'm wide open to evidence of the supernatural, but I also think that the majority of those experiences are probably natural phenomena we don't understand just yet.
I'm a firm believer that what you don't see is always scarier than what you do.
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.'
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.
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.
Building and sustaining tension is always my priority, so home entertainment provides challenges to that.
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.
When horror is about something - capital-A about - that's when it's really landing.
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.'
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.
