While most people only began noticing Mike Flanagan recently with some of his bigger releases, it was Oculus that first grabbed my attention. Most filmmakers typically learn and build a style as they get older and make more films, but with Flanagan’s Oculus, it’s easy to see the foundation of the rest of his career. While there are many recurring images and themes throughout Flanagan’s filmography, none is more evident than familial trauma and how it affects his characters. Sometimes, they succumb to it and lose themselves, and sometimes they’re able to move on. There’s room to discuss his whole filmography, but this essay will focus on Oculus, Doctor Sleep, and The Haunting of Hill House.
In Oculus, we follow the Russell family in the present day and the past as the Lasser Glass is brought into their home before ripping them apart. Flanagan opens the film with Tim’s (Brenton Thwaites and Garrett Ryan Ewald) dream sequence of a memory that has both traumatized him since he was a child and put him in a psychiatric hospital. It’s these moments that set both Kaylie (Karen Gillan and Annalise Basso) and Tim on the path to get the Lasser Glass back to make things right. In Doctor Sleep, Flanagan attempted the impossible by adapting a sequel to The Shining. Flanagan had to convince horror icon, Stephen King, in allowing his adaptation to take liberties and acknowledge both the novel and film. When we meet Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) in the present day, we see him as an addict, suffering from many addictions, but it stems from the trauma we saw (or read) that occurred at the Overlook Hotel. A lot of what he went through reflects how he carries himself once he’s sober, but also how he watches and mentors Abra (Kyliegh Curran). And then there’s The Haunting of Hill House, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s influential novel. This adaptation is loosely inspired by the novel, this time by making all the main characters members of the same family who had lived in the house as children. And as children they saw questionable things, things that the audience isn’t sure to add up to ghosts, or rather because the scenes are shown to us in some strange middle ground between memory or a dream. It’s this fantasy world that Flanagan’s series lives in, offering no answers, at least not at first.
All three films have a significant portion of the film (or in Doctor Sleep’s case, the entirety of another film) that showcase an important moment in the main character’s childhood, something they’ve struggled with that again informs them on how they carry themselves later in life. The Russells witness their happy parents being torn apart by an object, and the history attached to it, until one is chained up and the other chases them with a gun and threatens to shoot them. Dan had not only his father chase him through a maze trying to kill him, but also has had to deal with dozens of other spirits from the Overlook Hotel. Then there’s the Crains, the family that got run out of their own house by the mother that wants to have her children live in the afterlife that exists in Hill House.
Having characters go through something traumatic is common in most forms of storytelling, but when told through a horror lens, it’s able to add a level of extreme fear of what might come with this trauma. David Gordon Green’s Halloween is a brilliant take on PTSD, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is a haunting example of grief and postpartum depression. It makes our fears and traumas tangible and relatable, and Flanagan builds his characters to the point that the audience can understand the character’s motives completely. While most horror films (love ‘em, but looking at you slashers) include characters to be thrown away for the sake of a higher body count, Flanagan allows us to fall in love with his people. We slowly put their shoes on and walk a mile in them to understand where they’re coming from, so if they do die or get put in harm’s way, we react on an emotional level, not just a surface one. The reality is that Flanagan understands what many in the horror community do, that horror sometimes manages to be both an escape and an embracing hug with a loving community.
While the extremities that happen in these films aren’t typically common, the core themes that they’re based on can be common: domestic abuse, alcoholism, addiction, and battling mental illness. All of which in one way or another was found in my own home. Again, it was never to the extent that the films go to, but it was still there for me to witness even at a young age. I have vivid memories of having panic attacks at the age of five. Sitting up in bed listening to my parent’s fight, hearing plates and items being broken. The sounds of which filled the rest of the house and lingered in the air even after it stopped. I would begin to feel paralyzed, and then forget how to breathe and would find myself gasping for air before crying until my parents heard me and stopped to check on me. It wasn’t until I found myself in therapy at the age of 23 when I found out how long I’ve been having my panic attacks. The same ones that my mother used to have when I was 13, and we were sharing a room because my father had essentially kicked her out of their room, which was a precursor to her being essentially getting kicked out of our house.
For those that might be worried, my parents have had an on-and-off relationship since they met in high school. They’re currently living together, and arguably happier than they’ve ever been before. They both had things to deal with and that they’ve already dealt with. While many couples fight — and they still do — it’s no longer as explosive. My dad has never been physically abusive either, it was always verbally. This all sort of stemmed from my dad’s substance abuse that he tackled and quit overnight. While my mom is a very religious woman and we disagree on religion and beliefs a lot, when she calls the fact that he quit a miracle, it’s something I’ve never argued with.
To this day, when anybody begins to raise their voice past a certain decibel, my heart beats faster and I start having trouble breathing all over again. It’s both the adrenaline of whatever debate or fight I’m having, but also anxiousness that comes over me. As I grew older, I avoided alcohol and marijuana because I wasn’t sure how it would affect me. And then for mental illness, as I said, it’s been something I’ve battled with longer than I have originally thought. I thought it didn’t rear its ugly head until high school, but the voices that made me belittle myself and hate what I looked like started before I was ten. All of these things that were in my house have helped define me and changed how I carry myself. I avoid confrontation and if I can’t, I begin to hide as a coping mechanism to avoid the loudness. I go back to being five years old, sitting on a bed feeling paralyzed.
Flanagan takes these traumatic events that happen in far too many homes and finds a way to make them the worst possible (give or take the events of The Shining of course), but the emotions and reactions of his characters all come from a very real and painful place. In Oculus, Tim and Kaylie don’t beat their trauma, and just like me, they become their younger selves again. As Flanagan hinted throughout the entire run time, the Lasser Glass takes control and causes death. Without fail, even those who walk away never walk away unharmed. And the same goes unfortunately with the Russells, as Kaylie is another member of the family that joins the very long list of victims that the Lasser Glass claims. It’s worth noting that it’s one of two entirely “dark” endings within his filmography. The other being Ouija: Origin of Evil, which was doomed to have a “dark” ending due to how it needed to connect back to Ouija. It seems that Flanagan wouldn’t want to make his audience feel the weight of a mean ending, he wants us to learn and move on. While he gives us an emotional ending on many occasions, it’s more based on the character’s growth and what they’ve encountered rather than the entire loss.
With Doctor Sleep, while we find ourselves in another endless loop as a father figure dies and leaves behind a child alone to deal with all the spirits that were found in the Overlook Hotel, it’s a redemption of a death. It’s the death that Jack Torrance originally had in the novel, an explosion caused by the boiler room after Jack had been taken over. As Dan fights with being possessed, he calmly accepts his death, greeting his mother, again, reverting back to a child being embraced before the fire engulfs him. As we watch him sacrifice himself for Abra, we are aware of the long journey and battle he’s faced all his life. As he battled his own demons with addiction, he was also terrified of following in the footsteps of his father. But when he does die, after mimicking and acting the way his father did, he was strong enough to make all the right decisions. He knew of the evil in the hotel and found it in the bottle and did what he could to stay in control as long as he could, which was long enough to get Abra to safety. This allowed him to continue living the same way Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly) had prior — reminding Abra that he’ll be there for her as long as he’s able to do so.
Even in death, we have a connection to our family. In no project could this be more true than in Hill House. Throughout the entire series, we are shown glimpses of spirits, most famously the Bent-Neck Lady. Nell (the incredible Victoria Pedretti) grew up her entire life haunted by this ghost. Nell has been struggling with sleep paralysis and sees a sleep technologist named Arthur (Jordane Christie). It isn’t long before the two fall madly in love and get married, but just as quickly as they got together, Arthur gets a brain aneurysm and dies. This trauma brings the Bent-Neck Lady back. At this point in the Crain family, Steven (Michiel Huisman) has published his novel based on their experience at Hill House, and while some stay in touch, most of the family are doing their own thing. Between the loss of Arthur and all of the fallouts with her family, Nell returns to Hill House and believes she is reunited with Arthur for just a moment. While reality and illusions start bleeding together, she puts a noose around her neck and jumps off the same staircase that her mother had jumped off all those years ago. As she jumps off the spiral staircase, she jumps through time as the Bent-Neck Lady, haunting her younger self.
In one of the most incredibly emotional monologues I’ve ever witnessed, Nell gets the opportunity to speak to all of her siblings as everything slowly comes into place and becomes clearer for her. “I thought for so long that time was like a line, that… that our moments were laid out like dominoes, and that they fell one into another.” One thing has been sure across these three projects, time isn’t linear. We don’t always get the chance to go to sleep and pick up where we find ourselves the next day. Some days when some of us wake up, we are reminded of something that has hurt us in the past, and we carry that throughout our day. Whether it’s the loss of a parent, a sibling or even a pet — or something harder to name or pinpoint, we turn back to who we are in those original moments, struggling to breathe all over again. “Our moments fall around us like rain, or… snow, or confetti.” When these moments land on us, we feel the weight of them all over again. They could be easy to walk through or make every step feel heavier than the one prior. As her siblings begin to apologize about how they weren’t there for the last time she needed them, she reminds them about how they were so many times before.
While some may say it might be a simple point of view, sometimes focusing on the love and support and happier things in our life, it’s easier to cope and deal with the harder struggles and demons we all fight. Flanagan is never going to tell us that everything is going to end up better than they started but instead wants us to know that we can survive. We can find new friendships, strengthen our family core and find reasons to celebrate, no matter how small. “I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. The rest is confetti.”
