Over the last couple of years, Mike Flanagan has established himself as a force in the horror genre over on Netflix. WIth three limited series under his belt, Flanagan cements his influence on the genre as a storyteller that draws emotional depth from stories that still manage to terrify. Whether it’s a family riddled with traumatic memories like that on The Haunting of Hill House or a love story cloaked by ghosts on The Haunting of Bly Manor, Flanagan is interested in digging underneath the jumpscares and bumps in the night. He’s more concerned with troubles of the heart and what drives families to harbor so much sadness over the years.
So far, Flanagan has worked with Netflix and released three horror tales: The Haunting on Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and most recently Midnight Mass. All three are distinctive tales that nevertheless all deal with loss, trauma, and love. It’s what ties all three series together despite their diverse characters and narratives; they eventually circle back to the fundamental topics Flanagan seems interested in covering each time. It’s hard to rank these three shows into any actual objective list of “best to worst.” Not when each collection, on its own, works so well to redefine the horror genre. However, if pressed, the list would be better suited to rank them from an order of least emotionally impactful to most.
3. The Haunting of Bly Manor
Starring Victoria Pedretti (You) as an American governess for a wealthy British family, The Haunting of Bly Manor is a ghost story inspired by Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw.” And like all good ghost stories, it is also a love story. Pedretti’s Dani Clayton runs from her life in America to Bly Manor. Agreeing to nanny the niece and nephew of Bly Manor's owner, Dani embarks on a journey of horror and self-absolution.
Bly Manor’s appeal is not so much the jump scares but the blend of characters with their own personal hells. The story takes us from Dani’s backstory as a girl who only began to accept herself and her sexuality all the way through how she deals with her life's many tragedies. One of the most influential people on that journey is Jaime (Amelia Eve), the groundkeeper at Bly Manor. Dani is largely on the run from the calamities of her romantic past—she ended her engagement to a man, who died right in front her—but when she meets Jaime, they fall in love. However, as is the case for everything Flanagan writes, things don’t work out so well.
But The Haunting of Bly Manor is still about love in the end. All of the devastating choices each character has to make, they all stem from love; the love they feel for someone else or, even selfishly, the love they have for themselves.
2. The Haunting of Hill House
Flanagan’s first series at Netflix, The Haunting of Hill House is a family drama that follows the life of the Crain children and their parents across generations. There's a mystery at the center of the Crain's history, but Hill House is definitely also a horror story, with all the typical bouts of jumpscares and hidden ghosts. Then again, aren’t most horrors a mystery? Following the death of their mother, Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino), the five Crain children are left to reckon with that fateful night.
The Haunting of Hill House is, at its core, a mediation on generational loss and trauma as each of her children deals with the aftermath of Olivia's death in various ways. Some form more self-destructive habits than others, as the youngest Crain, Luke (Oliver Jackson Cohen), succumbs to drug addiction. Others, like eldest sister Shirley Crain (Elizabeth Reaser) bottle it all in and redirect that pain into keeping things in order and, ironically, running a funeral home.
Hill House becomes a tangled web of family trauma that only unravels as the house itself becomes the central focus of this pain. It’s the story of family love being more potent than the darkness that shrouds the house sitting up on the hill. Flanagan’s work in this Netflix debut touched a nerve in viewers as he skillfully wove horror and tragedy into one, making this series one to remember.
1. Midnight Mass
Flanagan's most recent series, Midnight Mass is one of the writer/director's most personal stories yet. It also makes it his best work to date. This series unlocked Flanagan’s most intimate fears and dreams, a tale of religious intrigue, redemption, and, more importantly, love. On the surface, Midnight Mass is just the story of an isolated community living on the shores of Crockett Island that begins to endure supernatural occurrences after the mysterious arrival of a young priest (Hamish Linklater).
Underneath the strange occurrences, Midnight Mass is about the more mercurial things of life. It’s about overcoming guilt and learning to forgive. It’s about the hubris of humanity amid religious righteousness. More importantly, like every other Mike Flanagan series, it’s about making mistakes in the name of love and also correcting those mistakes for the same reason.
Midnight Mass is more of a poem or an ode to humanity during so much chaos and uncertainty. By the end of the series, Flanagan makes sure viewers understand that humanity itself might perish without one another in this world. Midnight Mass is his most introspective work yet but somehow reaches farther into the human consciousness than anything he's created before.