Even with the spooky season coming to an end, there is still plenty of time to keep watching thrillers and psychological horrors before you get into the holiday spirit of Hallmark movies and Christmas classics.
In 2018 Mike Flanagan started his run of beautifully done horror shows on Netflix with a mini-series called The Haunting of Hill House. The Series is about a family that grew up in what would later be considered the most haunted house in America. They are pulled back to confront their childhoods when tragedy strikes them as adults. It is a modern retelling of a Shirley Jackson novel of the same name.
The Haunting of Hill House is a beautifully told story of grief and confronting your past with incredible cinematography and amazing character development. Flanagan does a great job of keeping the viewer on the edge of their seat with jump scares and ghosts in the background of every shot, while also portraying beautiful depictions of grief and generational trauma.
Flanagan has directed four more shows since then: The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher. All of these shows are available on Netflix and have been received well among audiences.
The Haunting of Bly Manor came out in 2020 and is based on the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It tells the story of a young governess hired to take care of two young children on an estate owned by the children’s uncle. Once she arrives she begins to see the apparitions that haunt the premises.
Midnight Mass came out in 2021 and is based on a fictional novel in Flanagan’s 2016 movie Hush. The mini series tells about an impoverished island town that experiences strange supernatural events after the arrival of a young charismatic priest.
The Midnight Club debuted in 2022 and is mainly based on a novel by Chistopher Pike of the same name, though it also features many other short stories by Pike. The show tells the story of eight terminally ill young adults in a hospice. The patients get together each night and exchange horror stories, they create a pact that the first to succumb to their disease must communicate with the other patients from beyond the grave.
The last and newest show, The Fall of the House of Usher came out in 2023. Its overarching story is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story of the same name. But each episode contains a different Poe story or poem, such as Tell Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue, along with many others.
Flanagan does an incredible job immersing his viewers into the story with all of his shows and puts a tremendous amount of detail into each episode. This allows the series to be watched and rewatched and you are able to notice things that you hadn’t noticed before.
