By Guest Contributor Matt Harries
‘The stories aren’t about horror, they’re about challenging ideas, confronting our darkest natures, and facing universal fears.’
Part 1: Absentia to Gerald’s Game
Mike Flanagan is a name you could reasonably describe as ‘hot’ among fans of screen horror. The self-confessed Stephen King nut recently declared a wrap on shooting for his second full-length adaptation of the famed writer’s work. Following on from Gerald’s Game in 2017 is Doctor Sleep, itself a sequel of sorts to Kubrick’s classic rendering of King’s 1977 novel The Shining. If the weight of expectation surrounding such a venture wasn’t daunting enough, this is also Flanagan’s biggest project to date in the eight years since his breakthrough full-length Absentia. However for anyone with an eye on the progress of the showrunner behind Netflix hit The Haunting Of Hill House, it will seem as though this is merely the continuation of a smooth ascent into the upper echelons of silver screen horror for the Salem-born director.
Is it reasonable then, to assume that Flanagan must have a keen eye for what sells tickets and for what studios want when they agonise over where to spend their dollars? On one hand, yes, he has been quietly successful and well-received for a string of modestly budgeted successes. However it is his persistent admiration of the human potential of horror, his refusal to ‘dumb down’ or resort to the well-used and abused tropes that infuse so much mainstream fodder, that has seen his star rise. Could it even be possible that he can also help to raise the notion of the worthiness, depth and importance of horror, that oft-maligned, lampooned and at times almost contemptuously disregarded branch of fictional entertainment?
Although the seeds for Flanagan’s success were sewn back in 2006 when his short Oculus: Chapter 3 garnered positive attention on the indie circuit, it was the 2011 release Absentia that marked his first major directorial step. Made for an estimated $70,000 budget, Absentia is in fact a great example of what has become recognisable as ‘a Mike Flanagan film’. Although there is a supernatural ‘monster’ of sorts – which remains virtually unwitnessed throughout and is referred to only speculatively – the overarching themes here are of loss and grief, hope and despair. The main characters include a heavily pregnant single woman and her sister, herself a one-time drug addict and runaway. The two are reunited when the latter rejoins her sister, who has been forced to declare her long missing partner legally dead (‘In Absentia’, to use the legal terminology).
Flanagan draws together a dark web of loss, regret and forlorn love. Through the speculation of the characters, he suggests a link to mythologies throughout human history in which individuals mysteriously disappear from their loved ones. With Absentia, he gives this realm of accumulated human pain – what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle might refer to as the ‘pain body’ – an actual physical manifestation. No matter how resilient man and womankind might be, this shadowy realm seems to persist as an inevitable underside to the human experience.
2013 saw Flanagan’s 2006 short emerge as a fully fledged horror film, named simply Oculus. This film delves into the dark history of a seemingly malevolent looking glass, that causes those who gaze upon it to experience nightmarish hallucinations and eventually enact bloody murder. This is perhaps a more genre-typical use of a haunted or possessed object, but it is humanity’s own dark character that is the food upon which the mirror hungrily feeds. The mirror suggests the infinitesimal meta-realities of the individual human experience, each person seeing their own subtly distorted version of reality. In this instance the mirror wreaks havoc upon a young family – family being another preoccupation of Flanagan’s work. The two young children grow up and finally unite to try and destroy the mirror in a sharply directed, clever and satisfyingly scary horror.
2016 was a busy year for Flanagan, with three releases. Hush, which stars his wife Katie Speigel (who also co-wrote), sees fresh life injected into the slasher flick, via the crucial use of perspective change. In this case we see and most importantly, ‘hear’ the world from the point of view of Maddie, a deaf-mute woman who lives alone in relative isolation. Despite the temptation to shoot entirely sound-free, Flanagan and Spiegel opt to drop the sound at certain moments, thereby showing the proximity of the killer to Maddie even as she goes about her evening activities blissfully unawares. Much of the script was developed in Flanagan and Speigel’s own home, allowing them to literally walk through the potential scenarios in the script. The use of the domestic setting succeeds in connecting us – likely as we are to be watching the film in our own homes – with the peril Maddie finds herself in. We see her preparing food as the killer stands pressed against the window behind her, we want to reach out, to shout, but in some ways we are as helpless as Maddie initially appears, before she eventually triumphs through sheer will and determination to survive.
Before I Wake is perhaps less an outright horror than a supernatural fantasy. Again Flanagan bases his tale within a very specific family dynamic, this time telling the story of an 8 year-old boy named Cody who starts a new life with foster parents who had previously lost their own young son in an accidental drowning. From the very first night in his new home, the sleeping Cody appears to manifest incredible visions, which later begin to include the couple’s own deceased son. While Cody’s ability to manifest his dreams entrances his new foster mother, who sees her birth son before her every night as though he is real, Cody also experiences nightmares. From within these bad dreams a monstrous creature – The Canker Man – appears, and begins to terrify the family in the waking world.
Eventually we learn that the Canker Man was created by the child’s perception of his birth mother’s death from pancreatic cancer years before. To once again borrow the idea of the ‘pain body’, here the fear and loss experienced, this time by a child, is manifested as a seemingly malevolent force, all too real and capable of causing terrible harm. How easy it is to imagine children everywhere in such their own terrible circumstances, be it war, illness or the threat of violence. Many times children are forced to frame their own pain in a narrative they can understand, to conceptualise what is beyond their ability to rationalise at their young age. Flanagan admits to having come from a large extended family who, as a consequence of having so many members who inevitably would suffer their own fatalities, illnesses and travails, in turn became inspiration for the themes he chooses to express through his work.
To wind up the busy year, the next project for the director was the sequel to 2014’s popular but critically panned supernatural horror Ouija. Despite a declared aversion to sequels, Flanagan took the project under the proviso that he would be able reframe the narrative in order to distance his film from the original. In Ouija: Origin Of Evil, the family unit this time consists of a young widow and her two daughters, who are watched by malevolent spirits awoken by use of the titular Ouija board. Again this film is notable for Flanagan’s trust in young actors. Starring alongside Annalise Basso, who previously featured in Oculus, is Lulu Wilson, who delivers an impressively creepy performance as younger sister Doris.
With an eye for period detail (in this case the 1970s) and an effectively chilling atmosphere, Flanagan and cinematographer Michael Fimognari created a film that kept enough subtle links to interest fans of the original, while managing to break away from the first film sufficiently to establish their own narrative. Critics hailed the film as a huge improvement. Another feather in the cap for Flanagan, whose approach of a family-centred dynamic and trust in unknown young actors would be taken to a new level with his future work.
Having worked his magic on a heavily criticised franchise, Flanagan next turned his attention to what had long been regarded as an ‘unfilmable’ book adaptation, namely Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game. In what is regarded as one of King’s sparser narratives, Gerald and wife Jessie retreat to an idyllic but remote lakeside property, with the intention of reviving their ailing marriage. Even on the outward car journey there are signs that the couple have differing energies. Bruce Greenwood’s Gerald seems wolfishly focussed on Jessie (Carla Gugino), who for her part seems aware of her husband’s ardour but unwilling to engage with it.
They are briefly held up by the appearance of a large dog, which they surmise to be a stray, which refuses to move out of the road as it feeds on roadkill. Soon after arriving, in another demonstration of the contrasting intentions of the couple, Jessie tries to call the dog to feed with the expensive Kobe beef Gerald purchased especially for their getaway. Does Jessie’s concern about this feral animal act as a metaphor for her failure to recognise the darker, animalistic impulses within her husband? If she is not entirely ignorant of Gerald’s intentions, she does not actively fight against them.
Soon they are in the bedroom. Gerald’s fervour is obvious; although seemingly unwilling, Jessie somewhat passively allows him to manipulate the situation. To her surprise, he produces a pair of handcuffs, which he uses to secure her wrists to the wooden bed frame. With his wife helpless, Gerald’s interior life is suddenly revealed as one of dark and possessive sexual lust, something which seems to shock Jessie. As things progress beyond her control, now faced with the stark fact of their own utterly opposite feelings, the mood darkens further. Jessie yells to be released as her husband becomes frighteningly rough. Suddenly he catches his breath – the onset of a heart attack. He slumps on top of Jessie, unconscious. Trapped beneath his inert body, Jessie struggles to move her husband’s body. Finally she succeeds in pushing him off of her and off of the bed. His head cracks sickeningly on the hard floor. Blood quickly begins to pool around his skull. Gerald is most definitely dead, and Jessie remains handcuffed to the bed. Amazingly, the above takes place within the first ten or so minutes of the film!
In the novel, Jessie begins to hear voices in her head, each representing a facet of her psyche. These voices help Jessie to delve into her past to uncover painful suppressed memories, such as the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Working through the pain caused by these memories in turn renews her will to survive. Flanagan, along with another regular collaborator in producer Trevor Macy, cleverly recasts Greenwood and Gugino in much the same way King uses the voices in Jessie’s head. A more confident, knowing version of Jessie parades in front of her; the version of her that knew what she was getting herself into over the unhappy years as Gerald’s subservient trophy wife. Alongside her we also see Gerald, now repurposed as the antagonistic, critical facet of her dead husband. Together these phantoms torment Jessie with the knowledge of her past failings and her increasingly dire current predicament, but in their own way they too force Jessie inwards, allowing her to confront those demons of her past, both of her childhood and her adult life.
Alongside these visions Jessie also sees another strange, dreamlike figure, who appears in the darkness of the bedroom carrying a box full of bones and strange trinkets. Gerald taunts her, telling Jessie that it is Death himself coming for her. Much later, with Jessie free from the lake house and healing her wounds, we learn that this figure was all too real – in fact a necrophagous serial killer who is being tried in court. She strides into the courtroom and confronts the man. Seeing his face shift from her father’s, to Gerald’s and back, she tells him that he ‘seems so much smaller than I remember.’ This marks the final triumph for Jessie, who turns and leaves the court with the ‘monsters’ of her past diminished and conquered, her true strength discovered and her life renewed.
Look out for the second part of Matt’s feature – Hill House and beyond – coming soon.