Series Announcement: Mike Flanagan Shows and Me

In 2018 I was at my lowest point, dealing with a lot of mental health issues and trying desperately to find myself again. In the last few months of that year I was on long term sick leave due to a full breakdown and was spending a lot of time reading and watching shows as ways to escape the world for a little bit. I was a huge fan of Shirley Jackson having read “The Bird Nest” the year before and “The Haunting of Hill House” just that year.

On the 12th October Netflix released their mini series “The Haunting of Hill House” directed and mostly written by Mike Flanagan. I had seen adverts for his horror films before but had never been interested. However, the slow burn horror and mind games Jackson played in Hill House tempted me into watching the show.

Thus began a love for Flanagan’s work and especially his Netflix shows. I enjoyed Midnight Club and Bly Manor but neither of them held me the way the other three series did. Hill House grabbed me immediately and having read the original book it was nice to look for little bits of the original story within the adaptation.

I grew up in a small coastal town that was highly religious and spent most of my childhood in a church. I also was obsessed from a young age with vampire stories, Count von Count was my favourite character in ‘Sesame Street’. This meant ‘Midnight Mass’ became a series that brought me in and hooked me. It was a way for me to start deconstructing my own beliefs and allowed me to face up to the religious trauma I had experienced.

Edgar Allan Poe has been a favourite of mine for years. At 12 years old I read “Annabelle Lee” for the first time and to this day it is one of my all time favourite poems. His short stories just fill me with dread in that fun spine chilling way that helped me deal productively with my own anxiety and built up tension. Given this and my love of his other work it was no surprise to anyone that I binged the entirety of “The Fall of the House of Usher” in two days.

From the minute I finished watching “The Haunting of Hill House” I wanted to write about my experience watching it and why it had become one of my favourite adaptations of a work that I love. It got thrown in the ideas book and put to the side to gather dust. Then I had that urge again with “The Fall of the House of Usher” and so I began working on a series of blogs on my thoughts about Mike Flanagan’s Netflix shows and how I felt about them.

It is March as I’m writing and I have spent the months since “The Fall of the House of Usher” was released planning and starting research to flesh out these blogs and now feel confident enough to announce this series. There are going to be 12 blogs in total starting with Hill House, moving into House of Usher and ending with Midnight Mass as this is likely the blogs that will bring up the most emotion from me and are likely to be the most difficult to write. I’ve put a tentative schedule below with the blog titles. I’m hoping to release one a month for the year starting on 27th March, so the 27th of each month is my deadline on each blog tentatively assuming there are no big issues that come up this year. The Midnight Mass blogs will likely not be out until 2025 as I plan to take December off due to the chaotic nature of the month.

Hill House Blogs

• 27th March 2024: Adapting Hill House. Blog will compare the original novel with Flanagan’s adaptation
• 27th April 2024: Building Tension and Hidden Figures. Showing how Flanagan builds tension and hides ghosts throughout hill house.
• 27th May 2024: Ghosts, Grief and Trauma. How Hill House shows ghosts as representations of grief and trauma
• 27th June 2024: Supernatural Occurrences or Mental Illness. How both Shirley Jackson and Mike Flanagan keep you guessing

The Fall of the House of Usher Blogs

• 27th July 2024: Adapting Poe Part One. Taking the title story and the first four episodes into review to examine their adaptation
• 27th August 2024: Adapting Poe Part Two. Continuing the review of the adaptations of Poe’s works in episodes three to seven
• 27th September 2024: Adapting Poe Part Three. Finishing off this three parter with the final episode and examining the other works referenced within the show
• 27th October 2024: Ghosts and Greed. Looking at the way greed and guilt are represented by the ghosts of Usher
• 27th November 2024: A Mirror of Hill House. Examining how The House of Usher is a mirror to Hill House in their adaptations

Midnight Mass Blogs

• 27th January 2025: Examining Midnight Mass as a Vampire Story. Looking at the interpretations of vampire mythology and how Midnight Mass does as a vampire horror
• 27th February 2025: Religious Imagery in Hill House. Looking at the way Midnight Mass uses religious references and imagery in the building of the story
• 27th March 2025: How Midnight Mass Helped me Process My Own Religious Trauma. This is gonna be a heavy one and a very personal one but should cover the way I actually found healing watching Midnight Mass