Quotes from Mike Flanagan

I'm a major NASA nerd, so I've spent a lot of time learning about the space race and the Apollo missions.

I'm a Stephen King fanatic.

One of the things about horror movies that I've noticed with the children I've worked with is that they have a great time.

I always liked the challenge of that, how to take an inanimate object and build something around it that's scary.

My gravity is always towards original material but 'Gerald's Game,' I read it when I was nineteen years old, I got to the end and had gooseflesh up and down my arms and the back of my neck, I put it down and said 'That's one of my favourite Stephen King novels... it's also unfilmable.'

What's so exciting and unstoppable about the horror genre is that I view it all as metaphorical exploration. It's the safe place that we, as a culture, can deal with things that upset and frighten us - the darker side of our nature.

We're all storytellers in this business, and I personally love to sit back and watch someone tell a story. If it's done well, there's nothing like it. It's pure.

There is only one act of violence in 'The Strangers' and it comes at the very, very end... the movie could have worked just as well if we didn't see it, in my opinion.

I do not have the female experience. I don't, and I strive to understand it, but I'll never truly be able to. I don't think any men will, really.

I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.

Audiences have grown to equate being startled with being scared, and will complain that a movie 'isn't scary enough' if it doesn't have enough jump scares... so that means that a lot of studios will insist on shoving jump scares into a movie, regardless of character or story structure, thinking it 'makes it scarier.'

In high school, I started studying movies and not reacting to them emotionally.

Gerald's Game,' we could not have made it at a studio without substantive changes to the story.

With 'Gerald's Game' in particular, we didn't have enough money or time and it was really hard.

A viewer's imagination is a powerful storyteller, and can often come up with things way more frightening than what you can explicitly show in a horror movie... try to engage that imagination, and the results can be magical.

I tend to over-prepare my shot lists.

Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That's all. The rest is confetti. -Nell Crain - The Haunting of Hill House

I saw our daughter dance at her wedding. Her smile was like a light and it was reflected in everyone's faces, and I recognized that light. Because it was ours. We did that. We loved each other so well that it spread out into the universe and it created a new star. -Hugh Crain - The Haunting of Hill House

I thought for so long that time was like a line, that our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they fell, one into another and on it went, just days tipping, one into the next, in a long line between the beginning...and the end. But I was wrong. It's not like that at all. Our moments fall around us like rain. Or snow. Or confetti. (Nell Crain, The Haunting of Hill House)

You shouldn't be thinking of losing each-other at all. Don't let that loom over your happiness right now. Enjoy that easy silence with him. It is rare what you've got. But, when the time does come... it will be hard every day and it won't get easier. But... eventually, after some time, you'll find little moments, little pieces of life that remind you of him... and you'll hold them tight. It'll be like he's here with you, even though he's gone.