An Incorrect Image Of Ourselves: Mike Flanagan on the Tenth Anniversary of Oculus

A ten-year anniversary might not sound like a great milestone; it can feel a lot longer when you consider how much has happened since then. Last week, prolific showrunner and filmmaker Mike Flanagan attended a screening of “Oculus,” his ten-year-old breakthrough feature, at New Orleans’s Overlook Film Festival, where Flanagan also received the event’s annual Master of Horror award. He’s more than earned it given the breadth of his successive work, from feature-length Stephen King adaptations like “Gerald’s Game” and “Doctor Sleep” to even more ambitious “remix”-style horror series adaptations like “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Flanagan’s successes as a horror filmmaker weren’t always a given. He’s been very candid with fans about his creative disagreements with Netflix, with whom he recently parted ways, and Relativity Media, who distributed early Flanagan movies like “Oculus” and “Before I Wake.” Flanagan’s also fairly open about some of the personal sources of his inspiration, including his struggles with alcoholism and his Catholic upbringing, both of which informed his tremendous “Midnight Mass” Netflix series.  Both Flanagan’s style and ambitions have developed considerably since “Oculus,” including his signature knack for monologues. His best work is defined by his fruitful collaborations with long-time partners like producer Trevor Macy and actress (and wife) Kate Siegel, both of whom first began working with Flanagan on “Oculus.”  I caught up with Flanagan last week in New Orleans, where we discussed the Bollywood remake of “Oculus,” his love of Carl Sagan, and his plans for talking to his children about religion. I’ve read that “The Shining” was a big influence on “Oculus.” I assume you mean the movie rather than the book, even though I know the book was also a big influence on you. I assumed it was the movie in this case because of how the Overlook Hotel was filmed in the movie of “The Shining,” and how that inspired the way you shot “Oculus.” Yeah. And when I first pitched “Oculus,” my elevator pitch was…Well, when I said “haunted mirror,” people would always laugh, but if I described it as a portable Overlook Hotel, that worked. That was what I said to Trevor Macy when I first met him. I said, “It's an Overlook Hotel that you can hang in your house.” The influence of “The Shining” is not only all over the structure of that story but also the type of haunting. There are also individual moments [inspired by “The Shining.”] Rory Cochrane has a full Jack Torrance arc, right down to a moment of lucidity at the end, which is from the book, but Kubrick jettisoned it. When we did “Doctor Sleep,” I took the ending of the “Shining” novel and brought it into the screenplay for “Doctor Sleep.” We shot the bit where Dan is threatening Abra, and then he kind of comes back to himself just long enough to tell her to run. So I've been stealing from “The Shining” my whole life.  For “Oculus,” you drew on the Jewish tradition of covering mirrors during a funeral to prevent lost souls from returning through the mirror. Can you talk a little about the research and traditions that inspired you for that movie? Well, that's the big one you identified: the Jewish tradition of covering up mirrors. When I first saw that as a child, it made me think about mirrors as portals. They were windows or doors into a space rather than flat surfaces. That really freaked me out as a kid, not to mention seeing all these adults very solemnly blocking the door, as though it was understood that if we didn't do that, spirits would come through. To a kid, that's radically terrifying.  There’s a cult value to antique mirrors, which are frequently used in rituals. We did a fair amount of research into supposedly haunted mirror legends, some of them being as simple as children's games like Bloody Mary. You take children and force them to stare into a mirror, knowing that the human brain, when confronted with a reflection, will distort it. That’s the whole point of those Bloody Mary exercises: they very shrewdly understood that our brains don't know what to do with an image of us, and if you stare at it long enough, your mind starts to change it for reasons we don't understand. It's incredible.  That made me think about how much misplaced trust we put into our reflection because we all have an incorrect image of ourselves. It’s backward, for one thing. It's flipped horizontally, but it's also flattened and on a surface that has its own warping and flaws. But we make this deal with our reflection every morning when we need it. We say, ‘This is right. This is what I look like.’ And it's not, just like how when we hear our recorded voice, we're surprised, even though we hear it all the time. The same phenomenon happens with a mirror; we're just less aware of it. Then we'll see ourselves in high-definition video and think: ‘Oh, wait, that's what I look like?’ That's how you know I'm only used to seeing myself