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Mike Flanagan is among the strongest voices in horror television right now, and his work with Netflix has created a chain of miniseries that linger in the brain long after the roll of credits. The secret to whether or not his shows will haunt viewers long after the credits is easy: yes, they will.
His movies are unsettling, not due to an excess of jump scares but because they explore the deepest levels of emotion, bereavement, guilt, faith, and remembrance, all through disturbingly atmospheric storytelling. Mike Flanagan's horror is imprinted because he operates within his genre differently.
Rather than employing supernatural beings for spectacle, he employs them metaphorically as symbolic of personal struggle and public trauma. All his Netflix miniseries are different in character: some of them are gothic romance, some are psychological horror, and some are social commentary.
They all have his pacing, layered narrative, and multi-dimensional character.
Below are the five Mike Flanagan miniseries on Netflix that are the best portrayal of horror that never ceases to exist in the mind after the screen is turned off
1. The Haunting of Hill House (2018)
Mike Flanagan's debut series for Netflix, The Haunting of Hill House, is a contemporary horror television classic. Loosely based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel of the same name, the show is a sweeping saga of the Crain family, moving freely backwards and forwards between childhood lived within the cursed Hill House and adulthood haunted by residual trauma.
The series is also remembered for its ghostly characters but also for how it portrayed loss, mental illness, and sibling relationships. The series became particularly renowned for its ubiquitous background characters, ghostly portrayals who appear in broad daylight but go unrecognized on first glance.
This nuanced storytelling exploited the lurches of fright for all they were worth without descending into crude shock value. Combining psychological intelligence and horror of a supernatural sort, Mike Flanagan produced a show that lingered in people's heads long after they had last watched it.
2. The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)
After the success of Hill House, Mike Flanagan was back with The Haunting of Bly Manor, a retelling of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and other stories. The show was different from its counterpart in that, while it had horror, it was more gothic romance. The tone is love, the love that can transcend time, memory, even death.
Though it has ghostly visions and spooky atmospheres, the emotional plot is at the center of Bly Manor. The characters are struggling with memory, loss, and unresolved business, so the show is more sad than terrifying. The method for the series was to amplify Mike Flanagan's gift for taking the horror genre and making it radically human, that not every haunting is about fear, but some are about love that refuses to quit.
3. Midnight Mass (2021)
One of the most self-referential works of Mike Flanagan, Midnight Mass breaks away from haunted houses and into the internal dynamics of a remote island town instead. The arrival of a troubled priest is preceded by a succession of miraculous and unnerving events, driving the townspeople towards a place of faith and fanaticism.
It is more interested in systems of belief than ghosts. Religion, drugs, death, and redemption are the subject matter that drives the story, and long dialogue has contemplative metaphysical investigations into life. It's slower in pace than most of his other stuff, but Midnight Mass is eerie because it shows how blind belief can bring about devastation.
Horror is based on human decision, something that Mike Flanagan always reiterates through his narrative.
4. The Midnight Club (2022)
Mike Flanagan took Christopher Pike's young adult novels and turned them into a series that crosses anthology with a minimalistic storyline. The series is about dying teenagers who reside in a hospice and come together each evening to share scary stories. Each story serves as an allegory for the narrator's own fears, guilt, and desires.
Although it was only awarded one season, The Midnight Club is otherwise worthy for its world-building and mortality themes. It also now, ironically enough, holds the Guinness World Record for having the most jump scares in an episode of television, something Mike Flanagan himself admitted was a tongue-in-cheek action on his part, as he had always been averse to cheap scare tactics.
The series investigates not only the impossibility of death but also the strength of young people before they come face-to-face with it, and for this reason, it is one of his most thematically intense pieces.
5. The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)
Mike Flanagan used Edgar Allan Poe's tales as inspiration in The Fall of the House of Usher and set them in a contemporary setting before incorporating them into one grand narrative. The series is a tale of the rich and morally rotten Usher family, the members of which die mysteriously under circumstances connected to their past transgressions.
What makes this series stand out is its blend of horror, tragedy, and dark satire. It is a denunciation of corruption, greed, and power, but in the context of a gothic environment. Poe's decay and death themes are transposed for modern audiences, but his core work remains.
The series was also a culmination of his work with Netflix on behalf of Mike Flanagan, as his last project before he moved away to work for other studios.
In all five Netflix shows, Mike Flanagan has established that horror can be employed to narrate stories beyond frights. His miniseries addresses universally relatable themes like grief, memory, love, and belief, and in the process of doing so, establishes settings that unsettle and haunt the audience.
From The Haunting of Hill House to The Fall of the House of Usher, each of them is typical of his own style, slow build-up, complex plots, and characters torn as much by their own feelings as by supernatural forces. The unsettling quality of Mike Flanagan's series is that it forces viewers to face uncomfortable truths about human beings, but within ghost stories and imagery that is creepy.
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This is what makes his series not only fascinating but memorable long after the credits roll.
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