Mike Flanagan's Hidden Treasure

IMAGE COURTESY OF SPOILERTV.COM

Director and writer Mike Flanagan has been a rising star in the horror renaissance for years now, but has perhaps, depending on who you ask, reached the pinnacle of his career so far in the production and release of the Netflix television series The Haunting of Hill House. Hill House has, deservedly, brought him more exposure and adulation than ever before. Although each of his films nurture a loyal and staunch group of admirers and the name Mike Flanagan was by no means unknown before the October release of the series (he had, in fact, released the Netflix film Gerald’s Game the previous year), Hill House gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his creative abilities through a multi-generational, almost epic story of family grief, loss and redemption across a huge streaming platform accessed by millions of people. The argument can be made that Hill House, as a television series that spans so much time and so much thematic content, is more accessible because of its broadness than his concise take on Stephen King’s one-woman novel, and has been seen and discussed by far more people. EVERYONE is talking about Mike Flanagan, and this mass exposure is new and probably bittersweet (recognition is lovely but adds pressure to the artist to satisfy their now-massive group of followers.)

It must also be relatively startling to a director who has had several films open to very limited release—films such as Hush and Oculus, as well as a film that, for a long time, looked like it would never be released. This film is called Before I Wake.

image courtesy of relativity media

Mike Flanagan had immense trouble with the release and promotion of this film, and it is not easily accessible in the way of other films (Amazon, for example, does not sell the DVD). This is partly because the company in charge of production and release, Relativity Media, postponed the release date several times and eventually declared bankruptcy. The film was eventually released in July 2016 (over a year after its intended release date,) and Netflix acquired the rights to it in 2017.

Let me clarify something: it’s not a horror film. At least, not in the way of Flanagan’s other films: Absentia, Oculus, Hush, Gerald’s Game, and Ouija: Origin of Evil. It previews somewhat the narrative and thematic decisions behind Hill House, and the way (spoilers!) Hill House is not a story about monsters chasing people, not in the traditional sense. Sure, there are ghosts and baddies but they aren’t actually the heart of the story. The heart of the story is a family whose members suffer tremendously from monsters and ghosts they have created themselves, that exist within them. Before I Wake, although a more optimistic film, acts as a prelude to these types of concerns.

Before I Wake tells the story of foster parents Jessie (Kate Bosworth) and Mark (Thomas Jane), who have recently lost a biological son and who are optimistic but cautious about welcoming Cody (Jacob Tremblay pre-Room), an eight-year-old orphan, into their home. They quickly discover Cody’s ability to bring his dreams (and nightmares) to life. For those who have not seen the film, I’m sure assumptions are abounding (evil child!) but it’s not as cut-and-dry as the formula would lead you to believe. Instead, Flanagan takes great pains to tell a story of grief so immense and incomprehensible, especially to a child, that it becomes an object of terror, the boogeyman in the closet, the monster under the bed. I have never seen a film that engages with this idea as effectively and beautifully as this one, and horror fans complaining about the lack of “genuine” horror would do well to keep in mind that grief in itself is often terrifying, especially when one is forced to relive it over and over.

This film is criminally under-watched and underrated, and it obviously does not help matters that it is very difficult to access (although Netflix Canada had it up for awhile, it’s now gone). Critics have been lukewarm about it and audiences have mostly dismissed it. But I would argue that it is an important predecessor to the success Flanagan is currently enjoying: as a writer and director, he has made it clear that it is not simply horror that is horrific, but that other, equally insidious but less definable things (imagination, grief, mental illness, empathy) can become horrific if they are not understood and properly dealt with.

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Meagan wants to eat your children. But she’s super fun.

Del Toro's Horror Elements

You might be familiar with Guillermo Del Toro, the director of the recent Oscar winning film The Shape of Water; at the 2018 Academy Awards, the film took home four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, and was nominated for a total of 13. Because of this mainstream success, the movie has enjoyed an exposure to a much broader audience than it would otherwise have received. (Before the nominations were announced, the film was playing sporadically in ONE Ottawa cinema. And that cinema was in Kanata. I had to go to Kanata…)

IMAGE COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION, 2017.

The Shape of Water is a lovely example of the ways in which Del Toro mixes genres to produce a unique final project: a heavy dose of fantasy, crime drama, and classic romance intersperse a piece of magical realism that is used to highlight and showcase the bright and exceptional qualities of the unseen and marginalized figures in everyday human drama.

Del Toro is well-known for the unusual and masterful ways in which he mixes genres, especially in the films he also writes, which tend to be more personal. A prime example is the 2006 Spanish-language film Pan’s Labyrinth, which is a beautiful and genuinely unsettling cauldron of historical tragedy, classic folklore and fairy stories, and horror (THE MAN WITH THE EYES ON HIS HANDS. Enough said). His Hellboy films also include an unusual mixture of comedy, science-fiction, and supernatural horror elements in an action/superhero film.

But I’d like to go back a bit further. Before Del Toro was an Oscar winner, before he was a director or producer of massive films such as Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak, and Mama, he was a Spanish-language horror director making independent gems with cult followings such as Cronos, Mimic, and one of my favourites, The Devil’s Backbone.

Made in 2001 before his first commercial successes, The Devil’s Backbone is a Spanish-language film that shares certain crucial similarities with Pan’s Labyrinth in terms of channeling the particular (and momentous) sorrows of the time period of Spanish history in which it is based, while remaining a solid and unflinching example of horror cinema—though perhaps not in the way you might expect.

Set at the end of the Spanish Civil War (Del Toro has called Pan’s Labyrinth, the events of which take place five years later in 1944 after the war has ended, its metaphorical successor), the films tells the bleak, uncompromising story of an orphanage run by a couple who are on “the wrong side”, as it were, loyal to the Republican cause that Franco’s Nationalist Movement is attempting to eradicate. Franco’s troops have already bombed the area, and the orphanage yard boasts a massive defused bomb which mysteriously never exploded when it fell (Important Symbol Number 1). While the war wages in the background of the film, seeming to creep ever closer to our central setting and to impose more and more immediate danger on the characters, another story is being told within the orphanage walls. It is a scary story, a story which the boys whisper to each other at night, a story to explain the inexplicable.

The figure at the heart of this film is a beautifully and intricately designed ghost-child who speaks very little but encapsulates the warped emotions caused by violent actions (Important Symbol Number 2). The film is a jarring harmony of the ghostly and the real, the horror elements only by-products of what man is capable of in the first place. The Big Bad isn’t the supernatural, just as it isn’t in Pan’s Labyrinth—that would be much too simple considering the context. The Big Bad is a story men tell themselves, of what it means to be “right” and what they feel they are entitled to do to others based on this belief.

Del Toro has found a remarkable way to communicate historical atrocity by using the horror genre. Historical fictions or dramas can’t convey the violent emotions and actions he is depicting; only horror, with its ability to evoke genuine fear, uneasiness, anxiety, and disturbed mindsets, can capture the truths of the story he is telling.

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Meagan wants to eat your children. But she’s super fun.

Father and Son

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE L.A. TIMES

In any situation where the son of a famous writer follows in his father’s footsteps, the question is raised as to their similarities: do they nurture a similar style? Do they share thematic interests? Is creativity genetic, and if so, how closely are the father’s genes mapped onto the son? In the case of Stephen King and Joe Hill, there are striking and uncanny similarities such as the contemporary concerns voiced in their works and their thematic interest in childhood and its dark side. However, I maintain that each has a different sense of aesthetics.

In one sense, King is more straightforward in his writing style, though both writers jump from genre to genre (sometimes within the course of the same work).

Hill’s latest publication, Strange Weather, seems to me quite a departure from his former style, but his previous works all share a sense of layered composition that in its nature is different from the tone of King’s writing. (It must be said at this point that I have not read King’s entire body of work, though I have read Hill’s).

In his novel Horns, for instance, Hill is meticulous about building and emphasizing the heavy historical and literary layers behind the concepts of good and evil, and Heaven and Hell. The imagery he uses shares much in common with Milton’s “Paradise Lost”—I believe it directly references it. Its obvious literary and historical predecessor is the Bible, but not in the sense that every horror film or novel about demons or the devil has the Bible as its predecessor. In a very deliberate and calculated way, Joe Hill takes the weight of biblical narrative and places it into the story he has created of a man, Ignatius Perrish, who suddenly gains powers that historically have been solely attributed to the side of evil, and as a result is forced to question his own nature and that of those around him. The characters in Horns, and in many of his other novels, embody and defy (often simultaneously) classic literary, mythological, and religious types and figures.   

King’s thoroughness, on the other hand, seems to reside in his seemingly tireless research into any object, place, time, scientific principle, etc. that he includes in his work. King’s people are his own; he has been writing so long that the type of characters that emerge from his work can be defined entirely in terms of himself. He can be cited as his own precedent. If you think about how immersive his creative worlds are and the ways in which his novels intersect with each other, King is creating his own literary history. Both approaches are incredibly compelling and I very much recommend the work of both writers. 

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Meagan wants to eat your children. But she’s super fun.

Introduction

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DAN A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MEG A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES NATE A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES SAM A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES NIKKI A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DAN A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MEG A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES NATE A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES SAM A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES NIKKI A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DAN A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES MEG A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES NATE A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES SAM A DULL BOY. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES NIKKI A DULL BOY.
(A chilling examination of the horror genre.)