Mike Flanagan is aware of get underneath our pores and skin. The horror auteur gravitates towards themes that take care of generational trauma and cyclical grief, entwined with supernatural manifestations of such visceral feelings. His Netflix horror hits provide quite a lot of scares: collection like “Midnight Mass” combine religion-tinted bouts of vampirism with acute human loss, whereas his rendition of “The Fall of the Home of Usher” maps the disintegration of a generational legacy marked with greed, betrayal, and ache. Other than helming efficient horror movies like “Hush” and “Oculus,” Flanagan has additionally tailored seminal literary works, together with Stephen King’s “Physician Sleep” and “Gerald’s Recreation,” which the director has invested with inimitable depth.
As somebody so well-versed with the interior machinations of the style, is Flanagan simply spooked? Possibly not anymore, however horror motion pictures “scared [him] an excessive amount of” as a toddler, till he got here to understand the terrifying capability of the written phrase to evoke uncomfortable feelings by means of well-rounded characters. Flanagan spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about this childhood realization, whereas expressing his deep love for King’s work:
“I could not watch horror motion pictures as a child. They scared me an excessive amount of. To attempt to hang around with my friends, I believed I might learn scary books to get braver. Stephen King was one of many first authors that I encountered, and I realized the exhausting manner that it is a lot scarier on the web page. And, sure, the clowns and monsters are terrifying. But it surely solely works due to his unbelievable humanistic look after the characters. He is all the time been my hero as a author.”
Nevertheless, this doesn’t imply that Flanagan is proof against the pull of an efficient horror flick. When requested in regards to the final motion pictures that scared him, Flanagan acknowledged that Joel Anderson’s “Lake Mungo” “actually frightened” him, whereas Pascal Laugier’s “Martyrs” was additionally a compelling watch:
“The final one that really frightened me into getting up off of the sofa was an Australian film, ‘Lake Mungo’. It chilled me to the bone. There are others, like this French movie ‘Martyrs’. There’s a number of gore, but it surely’s gore with some extent. I usually do not love splatter.”
The films that chilled Mike Flanagan to the bone
Spoilers for “Lake Mungo” and “Martyrs” to observe.
Flanagan’s excessive reward for “Lake Mungo,” specifically, shouldn’t be misplaced, because the 2008 psychological horror leverages its mockumentary format to deal devastating blows, figuring out precisely when to reel issues again and permit the dread to escalate. The disappearance of 16-year-old Alice Palmer (Talia Zucker) is recontextualized by way of her opening narration, which establishes the ominous nature of the occasions but to unfold, particularly after the Palmers discover her washed-up corpse close to a dam in Ararat. Unimaginable grief haunts the Palmers alongside literal hauntings, and the grainy, dizzying footage that captures their descent into guilt and sorrow marks the movie with a definite tint that’s fairly exhausting to neglect.
When phantoms of a cherished one begin showing in grainy footage, doubt ensnares our minds, as it’s powerful to sift by means of a deluge of feelings and grasp the unknowable nature of an existence past demise. Nevertheless, “Lake Mungo” injects actual terror into this horrifying “what-if” realization, the place unstated love, confusion, and ache contribute to an absence of closure. The well-timed scares solely exacerbate this hopeless sentiment that can weigh heavy on the Palmers endlessly, even after they’ve moved on from such a life-altering occasion and the spirit of Alice lingers.
Whereas Anderson’s movie is an train in restraint, Laugier’s “Martyrs” is the precise reverse, uncompromising in its portrayal of non secular extremism and the abuse inflicted by essentially the most twisted features of human nature. The legacy of the movie is kind of controversial, because the extremities depicted do really feel exploitative of their dealing with, but it surely nonetheless emerges as a terrifyingly efficient style movie that’s meant to shock and disturb you.
Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) and Anna (Morjana Alaoui) discover fleeting consolation in each other earlier than being subjected to their unspeakable fates, with the latter being compelled to behave as a conduit for religious transcendence at a particularly heavy price. By the point the credit roll, questions on salvation, atonement, and the character of existence discover their method to burrow into our minds, and the hyper-specific framework of brutality solely accentuates the void left behind by this singular expertise.
