Mike Flanagan
The Fall of the House of Usher further solidifies Flanagan’s mastery of his craft and serves as a testament to the talent he surrounds himself with.
Siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built a pharmaceutical company into an empire of wealth, privilege and power; however, secrets come to light.
Because the two seasons are about two very different ideas of death, these horror elements had to be presented in starkly different fashions.
Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor once again sees him revisiting an old horror text as a roadmap to explore human emotions.
Doctor Sleep may not be the most satisfying conclusion to both the book and film version of The Shining, yet it is still an engaging film in its own right.
Years following the events of “The Shining,” an adult Dan Torrence meets a girl with similar powers as his and tries to protect her from a cult known as The True Knot.
The Haunting of Hill House is full of arresting images and startling moments of pure drama; this is a show that doesn’t skimp on the heft and it presses its viewers with an inherent need to invest.
Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game, though not quite as dark as its source material, still showcases his talent for immersive horror film-making.
Before I Wake feels like a parody of director Mike Flanagan’s more successful work, prioritising emotional manipulation over story and scares.
Is this any way to sell a board game? Hasbro’s perennial moneymaker “Ouija” is the basis of Universal’s micro-budget horror franchise in the making, and it’s hard to imagine a game manufacturer working any harder to discourage people from buying its product. The 2014 release Ouija opened at number one, and a followup was inevitable.
Horror is in an extremely interesting place at the moment. Thanks to the rise of video-on-demand platforms and new technology, barriers between creator and distributor are disappearing, the amount of independently-made films are rising and the availability of these films is quite accessible. The trade-off of this is the problem of quantity over quality, which has meant that, much like the exploitation era of filmmaking in the 1970’s, every new or original film that is successful is followed with a string of derivative imitators, looking to cash in on genre recognition or fans looking to branch out on that particular subject matter.
The original Ouija is the kind of movie that pisses off cinephiles far more than the average moviegoer. It was competently made schlock, a paint by numbers horror film that never took a single chance. If it had faded into obscurity, then none of us would say anything about it.
So you like John Gallagher Jr., huh? Well, get ready to have that emotion shaken, because in Hush he abandons his usual affability to play a killer toying with a deaf and mute woman.
