If you’re a fan of atmospheric, existential and phenomenally well-acted scares that can only be found on Netflix, then you’ll be more than familiar with the work of Mike Flanagan by now, as the horror auteur has been maximizing his first-look deal with the streamer to move from one project straight onto the next.
Having already bestowed us with The Haunting of Hill House, sequel series The Haunting of Bly Manor and most recently Midnight Mass, Flanagan is already putting the finishing touches on literary adaptation The Midnight Club, while he’s also attached to graphic novel story Something is Killing the Children and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
In a new interview with The Wrap, the filmmaker explained why his latest episodic effort isn’t part of The Haunting anthology, and why not everything he makes for Netflix even has to be.
“I can tell you the biggest reason. So for it be a Haunting, it says that it’s about ghosts, right? And Poe wasn’t really about ghosts. And The Fall of the House of Usher, specifically, is not about ghosts. So the biggest thing is that there just isn’t really a haunting. Outside of that, the more boring answers are that we were developing this as a standalone anyway, that it was really always kind of outside of that universe. But I understand why people are definitely kind of clamoring for that word to be part of it.
You’ll see it is not at all of the DNA of the Haunting series. It’s very much its own thing tonally, thematically. It’s something we’ve actually never done before. And so it felt like we would be limiting it, in an unfortunate way, if we tried to shove it into that Haunting shoebox. It very much is it’s own crazy, over-the-top, insane, beautiful, macabre, just wicked thing that is so different.
I think when people see it, it’ll become clear, very fast that it’s like, ‘Oh, this is not The Haunting. The Haunting is like this sad, sweeping violin ballad and this is like rock and roll. This thing is adrenaline. So I think people will be able to see the difference pretty fast. But I very much appreciate the question, and I love that people still have an appetite for The Haunting. That makes me happy.”
Flanagan clearly has enough on his plate to present the distinct possibility that we may never see another new version of The Haunting at all, but based on the rave reviews and huge viewing figures brought in by Midnight Mass, that isn’t going to hamper The Midnight Club or The Fall of the House of Usher‘s chances of success in the slightest.
