Welcome to the world of Mike Flanagan — a place where your wildest dreams and most terrifying nightmares can all come true. Sounds fun, right? Whether it’s spooky season or you’re simply looking for a few scares on a random Tuesday night (hey, get your kicks wherever you can), making the horror king’s film and TV oeuvre your first stop is a smart move. Over the years, Flanagan and his now quite familiar troupe of actors have made some of the scariest, most haunting, and surprisingly heartfelt horror shows and movies out there — and his latest series, The Fall of the House of Usher (out Oct. 12), is no different. Not sure where to start, or what to revisit? We’ve got eight spine-tingling options for you to stream below. Pick your poison, if you dare.
Let’s be real: It was only a matter of time before Flanagan took on gothic horror icon Edgar Allan Poe. This eight-episode limited series (coming our way on Oct. 12) pulls characters and themes from a whole host of Poe’s work and gives them a modern spin with some truly lush visuals and genuine scares. The story centers on Usher siblings Roderick (played by Bruce Greenwood in the present day and Zach Gilford in flashbacks) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell and Willa Fitzpatrick, respectively); their troubled childhood and adulthood efforts to build a pharmaceutical empire; and finally, the devastating collapse of that empire, as forces from their past reappear just as Roderick’s six adult children begin to mysteriously die. Many familiar faces from the Flanagan gang are back, too — Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Samantha Sloyan, Rahul Kohli, T’Nia Miller, Kate Siegel, Annabeth Gish, and Michael Trucco all show up for the Poe party.
Why should the adults have all the fun? Based on Christopher Pike’s YA novel of the same name (and borrowing from some of his other works) and developed by Flanagan and Leah Fong, The Midnight Club takes place at Brightcliffe Manor, a hospice for terminally ill children. The house, with its own unsettling history, is home to a group of teen patients who meet every midnight to tell ghost stories. They make a pact that, when one of them dies, they’ll try to contact the group from the other side. The show, with a cast of bright young actors (including Iman Benson, Ruth Codd, Annarah Cymone, William Chris Sumpter, and Sauriyan Sapkota), is just as much about the emotional bonds the teens build with one another as it is about the mystery surrounding the supernatural goings-on of the house. You’ll be scared, but you’ll also maybe be scared by how much you cry? It’s fine! We’ve all been there!
Midnight Mass tackles ideas of forgiveness, redemption, guilt, Catholicism, and the dangers of unwavering faith while also delivering one of the wildest, grisliest conclusions to a series you’ll find on television — if you’ve yet to give this one a whirl, please correct that immediately. After serving four years in prison for killing a woman in a drunk driving accident, Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) returns home to Crockett Island, a small community off the coast of New England — but he’s not the only new arrival. The mysterious Father Paul (Hamish Linklater) comes to replace the old monsignor and not long after, inexplicable events throughout the island begin to occur until all hell breaks loose — in various senses of the phrase.
This second installment of the Haunting anthology series — scroll down for its predecessor — takes a few pages from the work of Henry James (most notably his 1898 novel, The Turn of the Screw) and is framed by a mysterious woman (Carla Gugino is back!) telling a ghost story at a wedding. That ghost story follows a teacher (Victoria Pedretti) in ’80s London who is hired by Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) to be an au pair to his orphaned niece and nephew at Bly Manor. It’s not long before she begins to realize the house is haunted in all sorts of ways –– and not long before the audience begins to realize that the two timelines are more connected than they seem. Prepare yourself for melted faces, unfriendly ladies of the lake, and some trippy mirror tricks that’ll stay with you for a while. Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Amelia Eve, Rahul Kohli, and T’Nia Miller also star.
What’s more terrifying than family? Take the Crains, for example, who we’re introduced to over two timelines in The Haunting of Hill House (based on the 1959 Shirley Jackson novel). In the first, we find the young family moving into Hill House while parents Hugh (Henry Thomas) and Olivia (Carla Gugino) renovate the old mansion, but the longer they stay there, the weirder things get, until one tragic night changes everything. In the second timeline, over 20 years later, we find the five adult Crain siblings –– all clearly affected by their time at Hill House –– reuniting with their estranged father (now played by Timothy Hutton) after a second tragedy. It’s full of ghosts, jump scares, and extremely complicated, wildly compelling sibling dynamics. And while the entire series is a must-watch — especially for the breathtaking sixth episode “Two Storms” — we’ll warn that once you meet the Bent-Neck Lady, you might never recover. Enjoy!
This adaptation of the 1992 Stephen King novel by the same name is basically a two-hander between Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood, who star as central couple Jessie and Gerald, and Flanagan couldn’t have cast it any better (watching them here makes their dynamic in House of Usher extra fun, too). Jessie and Gerald head to their lake house for what’s supposed to be a romantic getaway to save their marriage, but it turns bad once Gerald reveals he has plans to enact an abusive fantasy and handcuffs Jessie to the bed — that is, until he has a heart attack and dies on top of his wife, leaving her trapped. Over the course of days, Jessie fends off vivid hallucinations and repressed memories before she’s forced to attempt a truly gruesome escape. Come for the psychological thriller, stay for the compelling chemistry between Gugino and Greenwood.
Serving as a prequel to 2014’s Ouija, the ’60s-set Origin of Evil expands upon the world of the original while also paying homage to classic horror movies from that time, like The Exorcist and Poltergeist. In fact, in telling this story of a scam artist medium Alice (Elizabeth Reaser) and her two daughters, one of whom becomes possessed after using a Ouija board, Flanagan and his director of photography Michael Fimognari stuck to using tech from ’60s and ’70s filmmaking to give the movie a distinctly different atmosphere from the first film.
Since Flanagan is so adept at giving us all nightmares, it feels right for him to have an entire film about them, doesn’t it? Before I Wake stars Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane as grieving parents Jessie and Thomas, who begin to foster a young boy named Cody (Jacob Tremblay) after the tragic death of their young son Sean (Antonio Evan Romero). It doesn’t take long for Jessie and Thomas to realize that Cody has a special gift — or a terrible curse, depending on if you’re a glass half full or half empty kind of person: His dreams come to life. This, of course, means that his nightmares do, too. Before I Wake takes some big emotional swings, from the horrible consequences of abusing Cody’s gift to the film’s themes of dealing with grief.
