You may not know his name, but Mike Flanagan is the best new horror director working in mainstream movies today. Having helmed five features to date—including this Friday's far-better-than-its-predecessor Ouija: Origin of Evil—Flanagan has crafted an impressive scary-cinema resume full of supernatural tales rooted in familial grief and loss. Be it his 2011 missing-husband debut Absentia, 2013's haunted-mirror saga Oculus, 2016's deaf-woman-stalked-by-a-psycho Netflix thriller Hush, or the still-unreleased Jacob Tremblay-Kate Bosworth drama Before I Wake (whose theatrical debut has been repeatedly postponed due to distributor Relativity Media's financial woes), Flanagan is the rare genre filmmaker to strike a consistent balance between poignant character drama and terrifying thrills.

On the eve of his latest's premiere, we spoke with him about moving up to major studio films, the piracy-plagued fate of Before I Wake, and his forthcoming dream-project adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald's Game.

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ESQ: Ouija: Origin of Evil is a big-studio sequel, and yet one with few obvious ties to its predecessor. Was that a big selling point for you—that it's an existing property, but one that also gave you the freedom to do whatever you liked with it?

Mike Flanagan: Absolutely. I have an allergy to sequels and remakes in general. With this one, when I was first talking to [producer Jason] Blum, he told me they were really happy with the financial performance of the first movie, but no one involved had illusions about the critical response. So he said, "If we're going to get another bite at this apple because the movie performed so well, we really want to differentiate it, we really want it to be something that's it's own thing." The connections to the first movie weren't as important to them as making a good movie. If we hadn't had that conversation right off the bat, I wouldn't have pursued it at all.

It was really kind of freeing, to step into a franchise without having to play by the rules that are established by the first picture. [Blum] opened the conversation with, "What's the kind of horror movie that you can't get made right now? What do you want to do that no one's going to let you do?" My answer to that was, I really wanted to play with period. I really wanted to make a movie about a single mother, and with three dynamic female leads—I really like playing with fractured families. And the other thing I really wanted to do was play with the aesthetics I remembered from the horror movies I grew up with. The big one we talked about the most was [1980's George C. Scott-headlined] The Changeling…

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That's one of my all-time favorites.

It's so good. If you're making a movie for teenagers, it feels like there's this prescription for how a movie has to function. But the movies I grew up with—even the ones that were PG and PG-13—terrified me, and had this really specific aesthetic to them. So my [Director of Photography] and I watched The Changeling like ten times, and we watched The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and this awesome Disney horror movie called The Watcher in the Woods, which terrified me as a kid. We were like, "What if we just pretend we're making the movie in 1971, about 1967. We'll use nothing but antique lenses. We'll use zooms instead of steadicam. We'll use split-diopters and other things that have fallen out of vogue." And then in post, I was like, "Wouldn't it be great if, when the reels changed, we saw cigarette burns?" We put them on every reel change, and we put dust on it, and we warped the soundtrack a bit. That kind of stuff was really fun to me, even though I suspect most young viewers won't even know what that stuff is.

We were really operating from a place of nostalgia. I think we stopped thinking about the first movie after we got onto that track, because it was really just trying to recreate our favorite experiences being introduced to horror.

Universal Pictures

Ouija: Origin of Evil is rated PG-13, whereas Oculus and Hush were both rated R. Is it tough, with horror, working within those confines?

Gravity always kind of pulls me toward the more extreme side of things, so it's nice to check yourself and say, "I want to go for maximum impact, but I'm going to need to accomplish that just with atmosphere and timing, instead of shock and gore." I never minded it. And it was a directive from the beginning—everyone knew we were making a PG-13 movie.

The limitations weren't a hindrance, and if anything, they encouraged us to fall back on the kinds of techniques, and the kind of scares, that I really loved in Poltergeist and The Changeling. It was a way to remind myself about the kinds of things that terrified myself when I was a younger viewer.

Your films often deal with familial loss and grief—and, moreover, how that grief can be dangerous. Is there a particular reason you keep returning to that theme?

I think it's about safety. I grew up in a very healthy nuclear family, and I was fortunate enough to not have to deal with loss and grief as a child. I associate a family as the safest place in the world. So when it comes to things that scare me, introducing instability and tension into where you're supposed to be the safest really strikes a chord with me. 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. For whatever reason, I think the family is where that battleground is for me.

The horror genre is the safe place that we, as a culture, can deal with things that upset and frighten us—the darker side of our nature.

A defining characteristic of your films is an emphasis on real, three-dimensional characters, and how their emotional (and physical) circumstances lead to horror. Does each story begin, from a creative perspective, with your protagonists?

I have to fall in love with the people in order to care about what happens to them, and to our plot, especially with the supernatural angle. In its most basic expression, genre can just take archetypal characters, throw them in the woods, and kill them one at a time. But it can't make you care. And a lot of those movies, as a viewer, I find myself rooting for the killer. I think some of the appeal of the some of the more basic slashers is that you don't need to care, because these aren't real people, so you just root for the way they're going to die.

There's a market for that, but it just doesn't resonate with me. So the last brush I use when we're working on the script is the genre brush. I'll often type 30-40 pages of script without any indication that it's a horror movie, and that typically tells me I'm on the right path. Then it's about going back and trying to honor the requirements of the genre, and making sure you've got tension and scares and atmosphere.

Actress Elizabeth Reaser and Director Mike Flanagan on the set of Ouija: Origin of Evil Justin M. Lubin

What's the current status of Before I Wake? It was scheduled for release earlier this month, and then disappeared (again) from the calendar.

I don't know. We've been pushed four times now. The movie hasn't changed a frame since we delivered it back in 2014, and it's been heartbreaking. Relativity had a lot of very publicized financial issues to work through, and we knew that was going to be a very long, difficult process for them. I don't know what's going to happen with the film. I'm anxiously awaiting the studio to tell me their plan.

Compounding problems is that the film was leaked online, right? Has that further complicated its theatrical-release prospects?

We had international exhibitors and buyers who waited as long as they could, but then they released the movie. And that led to its inevitable piracy. The heartbreaking thing is that it's such a strange movie—it's really hard to classify, and it's a very personal project for me, and one that I knew was a creative risk. Our financiers and Relativity both took a big risk on it, because it's just not a movie that you can point to and say, "This is clearly just a horror movie for this audience." With risky projects like that, how they perform when they're finally released theatrically is the only thing that matters. That performance allows me to go to other studios and other financiers and say, "Yes, take another risk with me, because this one worked." Piracy takes a giant chunk out of the performance of a movie. It's massive.

I was devastated when I saw it was online. And even more so, I was amazed by how many people would pirate the movie, and then reach out to me directly say they'd seen it and really liked it. They were confused I was angry, and it kind of shed a light on this attitude in that community, where a lot of people legitimately don't understand they're stealing something. I had people even telling me it was legal, because it was available on a web site! It's like, no, it's not! At all! And the fact that you watched it there instead of in a theater makes it infinitely harder for me to make another movie like this. Not to mention it's actively taking money out of the pockets of me and the crew and everyone else.

Some people have this Robin Hood idea where they're sticking it to the big studio. But this is our livelihood. Most of us who work in the business still live hand-to-mouth, just trying to feed our families. With a movie like Before I Wake, you forgo a lot of compensation to keep the money on the screen.

You're next adapting Stephen King's 2002 novel Gerald's GameGerald's Game, about a woman who winds up alone, chained to a bed—which makes it another of your projects (like Hush) set in a confined, constricting home. Is the fun of such projects trying to work around immense practical limitations?

I read Gerald's Game in college, and when I put the book down, I had gooseflesh up and down my neck. I had two thoughts simultaneously: if I'm ever lucky enough to make movies for a living, I have to make this movie—and it's also unfilmable [Laughs].

It taps into some of my favorite themes that I like to explore in my work, but also some of my favorite things about Stephen King as an author. Which is that this is where the horrific elements are born completely from the characters and their situations, and even their geography. Taking a character and removing one giant element of how they're able to function and express themselves—in this case, it's mobility—is an incredibly exciting thing to do.

Justin M. Lubin

Netflix, which also released Hush, seems very comfortable taking those sorts of creative risks.

They have demonstrated an unprecedented amount of creative support. This is not an obvious movie to bring to most movie studios and financiers. We took it everywhere, and people were just like, "I don't know how you're going to do this. This seems crazy." And Netflix said the same thing—except they said, "We don't know how you're going to do this. This seems crazy. That's awesome. We can't wait!"

The lines between theatrical and streaming platforms have blurred incredibly over the past few years. Netflix now seems to operate like a '70s American movie studio, in that it's interested in giving lots of different artists leeway with their projects.

I think that's a perfect way to look at it, actually. I don't think this level of creative bravery from a studio has existed since the '70s. Everything has become so dependent on marketing-driven perspectives. We have entire movies being made based on what one focus group thinks will be attractive. In the '70s, people took big risks and put their support behind visionary filmmakers, instead of putting their trust in a committee of executives. Netflix is really bringing that back, and that's incredibly exciting, because even a few years ago there was this sense that if you went onto a streaming service without a theatrical release, it was the equivalent of going straight to video. I think they're demonstrating that isn't the case, and that the way we watch movies is changing.

Nick Schager Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t.

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