Filmmaker Mike Flanagan’s work first started out with distinctly spooky and well-paced horror and thriller features like “Oculus,” “Hush” and “Gerald’s Game” before he began moving towards something else.
Starting with his Netflix mini-series “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Doctor Sleep,” and then crystallised with both “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and this year’s “Midnight Mass,” recent Flanagan works have been as much (if not more) acclaimed – yet also more defined by their emotional cores, leisurely pacing, and sadness than their horror or supernatural elements.
Recently came news of his next Netflix horror series though, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” that will encompass a bunch of Poe’s other work as well. Flanagan tells Bloody Disgusting this week that he’s changing things up with the new eight-episode series and we can expect something much more frenzied and horrific:
“A lot of the stuff I do is a slow burn. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a brush fire. It is an explosion. It is as aggressive and rock ‘n roll and over the top and just violent and insane and horrific as anything I have ever done… by a lot. We’re gonna pull all the all stars from the Intrepid group of actors and some great new faces and we’re just gonna f—ing jam.
We want just buckets of blood pouring out of the ceiling on page two. And we’re just gonna go ballistic. And we’re gonna do it all to the music of one of the most intensely effective gothic horror writers. This is what we’ve been craving. A chance to just go ballistic on something.
The entire catalogue of Poe is wide open. It’s all public domain. We can cherry pick whatever we want and put it into one giant, crazy, heavy metal riff that’s just blood-soaked and wild. In a sense, we get to blow off steam after five very emotional years. And it lets me play in a corner of the genre I haven’t gotten to play in in a long time. It’s a relief really. It’s fun to have fun.”
That also confirms that several of his regulars from his previous projects will be appearing on the show, though no casting has yet been locked. Regulars of his include the likes of Rahul Kohli, Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Kate Siegel, Victoria Pedretti, Catherine Parker, Zach Gilford, Samantha Sloyan and Annabeth Gish.
Flanagan will direct four episodes while Michael Fimognari will handle the other four. No word as to when it will shoot, but we have Flanagan’s currently in post-production young adult-targeted mini-series “The Midnight Club” arriving before that.
