At this point in his career, you’d think filmmaker Mike Flanagan would have earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to deciding what’s scary. The man behind “Oculus,” “Doctor Sleep” and the Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Belly Manor” and “Midnight Mass” has made a career out of terrifying audiences. And yet, while working on his latest Netflix series “The Midnight Club,” the inevitable notes come down that the show needs to jump in more. And Flanagan isn’t the biggest fan of this particular trope.
“I don’t want you to think I’m picking on Netflix with this because I’ve had this note my entire career,” Flanagan told TheWrap in a recent interview. “I’ve gotten it everywhere I’ve worked. But there’s a general misconception, I think, that can happen to a lot of studios, and especially to a lot of executives. There’s a common misconception that being afraid to jump The movie or show gets scary. And it’s not like that, I guess. We had 21 jump scars in this pilot, I don’t think it made the episode scary at all.”
You read it right 21 jump scares in one episode.
It comes as a character in the show – based on the Christopher Pike novel of the same name and set in a hospice for seriously ill teenagers – is telling his own horror story, and jumps in to shock the other members. The Titanic keeps jumping in fear of the club.
“The thing about a jump is that it really eliminates tension for the most part. The noise you hear right after the scream in the theater is a laugh, and once the audience is laughing ‘If you’re trying to create tension and foreboding, he’s gone,’ Flanagan continued. “You let the air out of the tire. And there are some jump scares that I think are art, when you see Ben Gardner’s boat in ‘Jaws’ or you look at the hallway shot in ‘Exorcist 3,’ those jump scares are all-timers and They build on the tension that has existed up to that point and they make the threat of a situation even more obvious and terrifying. And while it gives you a bit of relief and shock and you can hear the communal laughter afterwards, it is a desperate laugh.
And yet, Flanagan says there is a thinking that when it comes to horror, more jump scares and more scares.
“More often than not, the note I’ll get is ‘More scares, faster, quicker.’ There is a feeling that horror fans will give up on a project unless you do a blowout every three or four minutes,” he said. “You should have three of them in the first 15” [minutes], these rules that come to the fore. All great horror movies break these rules, and when you point it out – you count the jump scare in ‘The Shining’, then count the jump scare in ‘The Exorcist’ for the first hour – it doesn’t necessarily Is [the studio] And so the notes keep coming, and in this particular case because it was a YA show, there’s going to be a little bit more pressure of fear. ,
Flanagan was presented with a Guinness World Record at New York Comic-Con most afraid of jumping In a TV episode for “The Midnight Club”, which he finds extremely funny.
The filmmaker said, “I think this Guinness thing is kind of hilarious, because you know, it was an attempt to really take the jump power out of the show and eliminate it completely.” “Just say, ‘Now it’s done and it’s not going to have an effect. We can focus more on the important things,’ but it went a different way. And you’re right, that record for me Being is something that I think is really funny and something that I’m also really grateful for and I think it’s really fun.”
And Flanagan had to keep her word, too.
“It’s got 21 rapid-fire jump scares that prove a jump scare in itself isn’t scary.”
“The Midnight Club” is now streaming on Netflix.
