We caught up with filmmaker Mike Flanagan—known for edge-of-your-seat Netflix thrillers like The Fall of the House of Usher, Midnight Mass, and The Haunting of Hill House—just after the triumphant showing of his new movie, The Life of Chuck, at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where it won the People’s Choice Award.
He was juggling numerous meetings that week, trying to find a distributor for the film. (It was eventually acquired by Neon and is set for a summer 2025 release.) But he was relaxed, cheerful, and more than happy to talk by phone about Maryland Halloweens, his literary heroes, how his six-year sobriety has shaped his work, and the possibility of moving away from horror a bit.
Flanagan, 46, who grew up in Bowie, lives in Los Angeles now with his wife, actor Kate Siegel, and has three school-age children, one from a previous marriage. But he hasn’t forgotten his Maryland roots. He still visits the Prince George’s County town where he grew up—where his still parents live—and makes treks to Baltimore to visit his writer-actor brother, Jamie.
And he’ll always be a Towson Tiger. His memories of attending Towson University, class of 2002, run deep—from his time working at the now closed Suncoast video store in Towson Town Center and bussing tables at Outback Steakhouse to his visits to Poe’s gravesite at Westminster Hall. As he said at the end of our conversation, “Go Tigers, indeed.”
You’ve said that your concept of Halloween comes from living in Maryland. What did you mean by that?
It was formed by trick-or-treating in Bowie as a kid with the skeletal branches of trees, that cold air that isn’t quite winter that just kind of sends a chill up your spine, and the moonlight through bonelike branches. I try to recreate that experience for my kids, which is enormously challenging in Los Angeles. You do not get that feeling at all. But over the years, bringing them back to Maryland and spending time in other places, I have been able to give them that beautiful crisp, fall, Halloween experience that I remember. I hope I’ve succeeded somewhat in that. It’s tougher out here.
How are you going to celebrate Halloween this year?
This year, we’re in California for the first time in a while. I’ll be taking the kids to haunted mazes and hayrides. My older son and I are going to be doing Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, which is as about as Los Angeles Halloween as you can get. The biggest thing I can do is to tell ghost stories around a campfire, which we can do at my house even if we use a fireplace. Aside from trick-or-treating, leaning into the spookiness of it with ghost stories is something my kids really enjoy.
What was your childhood like growing up in Bowie?
It was ideal in so many ways. It was a life of riding bikes all over town, baseball, and the loveliest version of the Maryland suburbs. It was just wonderful.
What made you decide to go to Towson University?
Towson looked like a great option that fit within my family’s budget. The additional bonus was that Towson had a mass communication department that [expanded to a department of electronic media and film]. That really was an incredible stroke of luck for me because, when I got to Towson, I majored in secondary education to be a history teacher until I took my first film class. That changed everything.
As a commencement speaker at Towson University last spring, you told the graduating students to remember, “It’s always later than you think.” What did you mean?
What I was really trying to get across to the students was that I remember sitting where they were sitting and feeling like the whole of my life was stretched out before me on this beautifully long, luxurious road. And it’s been a blink since I was there. And now talking to them at this point in my life as I feel certain that I’m past the midpoint, that’s an amazing revelation for me.
You are often referred to as the “go-to horror guy in Hollywood.” Do you see yourself that way?
There are a lot of good horror people in Hollywood. I’m certainly lucky to be counted as one of them. It’s interesting to me these days because I just unveiled my latest movie [The Life of Chuck], which is not a horror film. I hope I’ll be outside of the horror genre a little bit from now on. We’ll see how it goes.
The Life of Chuck, based on a novella by Stephen King, is about the life of an ordinary man. One of the film’s themes is that life’s small moments are often the moments that make it precious. What is precious in your life?
The most precious thing in my life is the time that I can spend with my children and my wife. As life gets busy, we know how tough it is to hold onto that family time. It’s not about the big dramatic moments. It’s the little ones. It’s the bedtime stories, the board games, just spending time together. Those are the things that have grown more critically important to me as I’ve gotten older. Beyond that, The Life of Chuck focuses a lot on the spontaneous moments we do when we’re able to either make or meet joy in our lives, whether that’s through music or dance or movies or sports or connecting with nature. That’s what this movie is meant to celebrate for all of us.
You’ve been sober for six years. How has that affected your work?
I spent an awful lot of years feeling like I should address this issue with alcohol at some point but not today, not right now. It has radically improved my life and an amount of riches in my life that were all there and waiting for me to catch up with them.
Was your miniseries Midnight Mass—in which one of the main characters was affected by addiction and had a tragic accident—part of your recovery?
Absolutely. Midnight Mass opens with what was one of the biggest fears in my life. It was not that I was going to lose my life to drinking, but that I could black out and drive drunk and kill someone else and survive. I started writing Midnight Mass 10 years before we made it and well before I was sober.
Sobriety came into my life about a year or two before we were earnestly making that show. So many of the conversations in that series are dialogue versions of myself on either side of sobriety. It’s a deeply autobiographical and personal story, and the more I look back now with some distance from it, the clearer it is to me to what extent I was pouring my own type of anxiety and inner battle about sobriety onto the pages of that show.
You grew up Catholic and attended Catholic schools through high school. Has that made a difference in your life?
It’s made a profound, formative difference in who I am. I grew up as an altar boy and nestled in the Catholic church, and it wasn’t until my early adulthood that I started to investigate all the religions that I could find. I really put a half decade into researching world religions and emerged from that a secular humanist. A lot of that is also represented in Midnight Mass. You’re hearing characters that represent me in different phases of my life in conversation with each other about the role of faith and religion, corruptibility of religion, weaponization of faith and religion, but also, ultimately, a lot about redemption and forgiveness. I have come to believe it doesn’t matter what we believe. It only really matters what we do and how successful we are in loving each other.
Growing up, you had a fear of horror and read the works of Edgar Allan Poe and others to help you through it. Did it help?
It helped in a way I didn’t expect. I was terrified of horror. I couldn’t watch scary movies with my friends. I would pretend to be sick at sleepovers if they were watching a horror movie, so I could go home. Or I’d watch through my fingers, or look somewhere else in the room away from the television. Reading, I thought, would be a way to get better at it. I thought it would less scary if I was reading something because I would have control of it.
But the opposite is true. It’s much worse reading a scary story than seeing a scary movie because it stirs your imagination in an intense way. What happened, though, is that I got completely invested, especially with Stephen King, in the characters, so I had to force myself to keep reading these scary stories because I cared about what happened to the people on the page. What I realized eventually was that getting through a scary chapter or a scary scene in a movie was making me braver in very small increments. And that was an incredible revelation for me.
What was it like when you finally got to meet Stephen King?
It was a dream come true. He’s one of the most generous and kindest people that I’ve met. The first time I met him was when I brought my finished version of Doctor Sleep [Stephen King’s 2013 horror novel] to his hometown movie theater in Maine to show it to him before the movie was released. I sat with him in an empty theater and watched the movie. Only I didn’t watch the movie, I watched him, which I’m sure made him uncomfortable, but I was utterly living or dying by every little reaction he had.
[In Toronto in September], I did it again. I sat next to him and watched [The Life of Chuck], which was an adaptation of his work, except this time we watched it with 2,000 other people. I had this moment where I wanted to pinch myself and realize, yet again, I was sitting with my hero, showing him my version of his work. If you would have told my childhood self that I would be sitting next to him, I would not have believed you.
Edgar Allan Poe is another literary hero of yours. Have you been to his gravesite?
We made a few pilgrimages when I was an undergrad at Towson. I remember the first time I got to visit the grave and trying to wrap my head around what Baltimore must have looked like to Poe and what the world must have looked like to him. That’s a fascinating mental exercise that I do to this day. I wonder whether we would have walked the same streets or inhabited the same space, separated by all of this time. That kind of stuff used to be really fun to speculate about over a drink, or five.
What’s next for you?
The big thing I’m embarking on right now is my take on The Exorcist for Universal as a movie. I’m digging into the script about it as we speak. The original movie still scares me to death. We’re never going to top that. It’s a whole new story that’s meant to evoke and honor what came before it but also stand on its own, because I really feel like that story was told perfectly. Universal has put a release date on the movie for March 13, 2026. I’ve got some TV projects with Amazon that are in various stages. A lot of people have been making a big deal about us developing a series on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, and that’s still moving forward. It’s a huge undertaking and is taking an enormous amount of time. [Laughs.] It’s always later than you think.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.