Mike Flanagan's on a roll. He has been for some time. From his underseen debut, Absentia, to Ouija: Origin of Evil, the big-budget sequel that far, far surpassed the original, Flanagan has a knack for crafting some of the scariest, smartest horror out there.

Netflix's Gerald's Game Is an Unrelenting Sprint Into Madness Carla Gugino stars in what might be one of the great Stephen King adaptations of all time.

His winning streak continues with Gerald's Game, a horror-thriller adapted from the Stephen King book of the same name, in which Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) handcuffs his wife, Jessie (Carla Gugino), to the bed in a sex game during a romantic getaway. He promptly dies of a heart attack, and Jessie is left, chained to the bed, without any hope of escape. It's good, and all the more impressive for how, as a Stephen King adaptation, it was able to get significant hype despite It's release just a few weeks beforehand. The film is Flanagan's dream project, and now that that's out the way, it's hard to imagine what comes next won't be bigger, better, and even more brutal than his past work.

GQ: I read a rumor that you used to bring a copy of Gerald's Game to meetings, just in the wide-eyed hope that you might one day get to make it.

Mike Flanagan: That's absolutely true. It occurred to me when we were doing the final sound mix on the movie earlier this year that, "Wow, it's been half my life I've been carrying this movie around in my head trying to make it." It's a very surreal day that all of a sudden it's available to millions and millions of people. That's crazy. That's crazy! Right?

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."

Then Netflix came along and helped things out.

Yeah. Netflix was after Hush and because of how well that did, they said, "What do you have that you're really excited about?" We gave it to them and kept expecting the response it's gotten a lot of times over the years, which is: "Love Stephen King. Very cool, but we need to make substantial changes to try to open this up into a much more 'cinematic experience.'"

All of the changes that you could make that would make a studio marketing department happy are all things that really have nothing to do with the source material. It was a relief that Netflix wanted to make the same movie we wanted to make.

It feels like the changes that you did make, with the ghost "Geralds" and "Jessies," seems like the easiest way to keep the spirit of the thing.

Yes, exactly. It let us take so much of the internal monologuing that Jessie does in the book, and put it up on its feet, put those wonderful words into someone's mouth.

The book would also bring in these other characters we never really met before, her old college roommate, her psychiatrist, this puritanical wife. That would have been a little theater-of-the-absurd, I felt, in a movie, considering that some of what the story was about. For me, it was about this marriage, and about Jessie and Gerald. It seemed really natural that even though he'd turned up dead, we'd still be with that marriage and kind of dissecting with them for the runtime. That's what really opened up the adaptation for me. That's what made me feel like it could be a movie.