SXSW Exclusive: Mike Flanagan Talks Oculus Origins, Designs, Stephen King & Somnia

Luckily, I was granted the chance to interview him while down in Austin, Texas. We shared our mutual affection for True Detective before steering on topic. Read on to learn a bit about Flanagan’s approach to horror, how Stephen King impacted him, how Oculus got its start and what we can expect from his next film, Somnia.

In Oculus, opening April 11th, a brother and sister take on a haunted mirror that has destroyed their family. Somnia, currently in post-production, stars Kate Bosworth in a story about an orphaned child whose dreams – and nightmares – manifest physically as he sleeps

Ryan Turek: I noticed Courtney Bell from Absentia made it into Oculus as the autioneeer…

Mike Flanagan: It’ll be on the DVD, but we shot a scene with Katie Parker from Absentia, too. The scene didn’t make it into the final film. I’m excited to have it on the DVD. I love having the Absentia peeps in there.

Turek: Your films, prior to Abenstia, I noticed were dramas.

Flanagan: Well, in what passes for a drama when you’re 21. They were like college relationship movies that are not fit for public consumption. [laughs]

Turek: The primary things I’m getting at is your films are about character and relationships. And that bleeds through your horror works really well.

Flanagan: Absolutely. Somebody had said of Absentia, if you strip away the supernatural elements, the story still functions as a drama. And that’s always been the goal. Scares land much better when you’re emotionally involved in the character. If you can treat them with the same respect when you’re writing that you would apply to a drama, it makes a huge difference. It’s so easy to startle somebody and I think horror movies just lean on that. 

Turek: Where did you horror education come from?

Flanagan: Books. I’m a Stephen King fanatic. In the 6th grad I read “IT” – a little young for that material – but it messed me up for a long time. I read everything he wrote. My book collection is nothing but King hardcovers. Others like Christopher Pike, the tweeny horror stuff…I read a lot of that. So, I came from a background reading books because, as a kid, I couldn’t watch scary movies. My parents wouldn’t let me and if they did, I would get unreasonably freaked out. What I loved about the books though was that all of the horror elements, you’re gifted an opportunity to create the horrors out of your imagination as opposed to having them flung at you. King is so good with his characters, generally. He lets you live in their skin and that makes for interesting, complicated people. And, as I got into movies, I came at it through slashers. Things like The Shining, as a student of cinema I adore, and as a fan of Stephen King, I hate. Things like that. I got into the Eastern horror when that happened and was importin the Ju-On films and that stuff really scared me.

Turek: How did Oculus get its start?

Flanagan: Well, I did the short and it played middle-tier festivals, people really dug it. There was interest immediately to turn it into a feature. And everyone wanted to do it found footage because there were mirrors in the room. I didn’t want to do that. We had a short treatment for a feature expansion and that sat in the drawer. After Absentia that one would come out of the drawer. I took a meeting at Intrepid and they were excited to do it the way it should be done. Oculus was the last thing I pitched them. I pitched them other stuff like Nightmares which has since become Somnia and that we’re now in post-production on. The treatment for Oculus has the sibling relationships and the proposal for a braided timeline, but once we started developing that take, that’s where the idea of shooting it all in the same location, the house, came in and it allowed for us to have the timelines exist in the same space.

Turek: Talk about the design of the mirror, or I should say the framework. It looks a little by like it has a face perched on top.

Flanagan: Yes. There’s a very subtle face design in the crown, which I think is awesome. We had scoured the Internet looking for the mirror in the short, because we didn’t have any money. We had something there that had this organice frame we thought was cool. We used that as a jumping off point for our production designer on the feature. He really wanted to give it a human but inhuman quality, almost alien, at the same time. We went through a few variations on the face that’s in there. Rather than sculpt the face, we were like let’s sculpt the mirror around the area where the face would be. So, the face is in the absence of the frame and I love that thematically for the movie. What’s also cool, but what is tough to see in the movie because everything is moving so fast, the texture of the frame is actually humanoid figures that are all intertwined.

Turek: How does Somnia differ from Oculus?

Flanagan: Somnia, of them all, is the most beautiful. I would describe the movie as beautiful horror. It has a much more intense emotional component and makes it more broadly appealing. It is, in some senses a horror film, but to brand it and package it as horror sort of sells it short. Talking about the dramatic aspects here, if you do remove the supernatural it’s an incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking story. Visually, it’s the most ambitious thing I tried to do with a dreamscape quality to it. It’s a very different animal from Oculus and horror, I think, because I can’t think of too many things to compare it to, so I think that’s cool.

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