Quotes from Mike Flanagan

Audiences are savvy. You can never go wrong assuming the best of them.

I have an allergy to sequels and remakes in general.

I did not growing up watching a lot of horror. I wasn't allowed a lot of it and I was a real chicken.

Audiences are embracing more and more unique material. I think they can sense the cynicism when people are just cranking something out to try to ride off the success of something else. I think they can feel it.

I don't like the fact people watch things on their phones and tablets, it kind of hurts my heart.

I'm sure many more people saw 'Hush' in the first weekend it was on Netflix than saw 'Oculus' in theatres.

I'm a big believer in building a crew. Movies are the most collaborative art form at the tend of the world, and it takes hundreds of people to make one. At the end of the day, I get the lion's share of praise or blame but everybody on the ground knows that it was all of us.

Depending on how 'Doctor Sleep' does, we'll see what movie opportunities there will be.

I saw 'The Shining' in eighth grade. I watched it on VHS at a sleepover and was petrified, totally petrified. And I didn't really start to digest the movie properly and understand it from a filmmaking perspective until I got older. But it pretty much defined what it meant to be scared of a movie for me.

I've always been fascinated with the '60s in general.

I started off making backyard movies. I think it began in fifth grade - I'd get the friends together and we'd make little home movies. I always wanted to make movies but I didn't know how. It was always something really fun to do.

I'm a firm believer that what you don't see is always scarier than what you do.

I'm wide open to evidence of the supernatural, but I also think that the majority of those experiences are probably natural phenomena we don't understand just yet.

A movie studio has to answer to a marketing department, and to shareholders, to ensure the broadest audience possible for its product; it tends to err on the side of caution as a result.

Building and sustaining tension is always my priority, so home entertainment provides challenges to that.

For me it's about creating and sustaining tension for as long as possible, and I'm not generally interested in allowing that tension to be deflated, especially by a jump scare.

I associate a family as the safest place in the world. So when it comes to things that scare me, introducing instability and tension into where you're supposed to be the safest really strikes a chord with me.

When I read Doctor Sleep, when it was first published, I was so taken with getting to spend time with Danny Torrance again.

Thanks to 'It,' you're going to see the studios take a lot more chances on a very specific vision. An R-rated horror film about children being eaten by a monster that lives in a sewer is not normally something that a studio would throw their weight behind. But we've seen the success of it, which props everyone up.

At home, people are more likely to be distracted than in a theatrical environment. They're checking their phones, pausing to get a snack, or sometimes jumping from show to show.

People will bemoan the quality of horror but then they'll go out and support horror films that are lacking qualities that they say they want.

I grew up in a very healthy nuclear family, and I was fortunate enough to not have to deal with loss and grief as a child.

It's a wonderful thing to watch an actor just act.

I like to say that Hollywood is one of the most democratic entities in the world and the reason why is every ticket is a vote.