OCULUS 10th Anniversary Interview with Mike Flanagan

At the Overlook Film Festival, attendees were treated to a rare screening of Oculus in celebration of its 10th anniversary and Mike Flanagan being awarded with the festival's Master of Horror award! Ahead of the screening, I had a chance to catch up with Mike Flanagan for an in-depth discussion on one of my favorite modern horror films. From discussing him playing Bloody Mary and his fascination with mirrors, to casting, the on-set experience, and sequel chances, we discuss it all below:

I can't believe it's been 10 years since Oculus was released! It's interesting because I hadn't revisited the film in a little bit, but I've seen everything that you've directed, and so it's been a joy to watch the progression of your career, the stories you tell, and the way you tell them. 

Looking back at Oculus, it's very much a blueprint for telling really powerful supernatural stories rooted in family dynamics and trauma. Everything's there and Oculus is really so great. Have you rewatched it recently or will tonight be the first time in a while?

Mike Flanagan: I haven't seen it in a very long time, so tonight's going to be really cool for that. It's been at least four or five years since I've watched it, and I completely agree with what you said about the seeds of a lot of things that came later are all right there. Hill House is basically just Oculus done 10 times. The structure is almost the same, so it's a really interesting thing to revisit, especially now having worked with Karen [Gillan] again and I've worked with Annalise [Basso] now three times. She was a child in Oculus and she's older now than Karen was when we made it. 

I have an enormous amount of affection for that movie and I'm very excited tonight to see it with a crowd. It's the closest outcome to me being able to watch the way the audience gets to watch it. It's so far out of my mind at this point that I'll get to really see it.

The Lasser Glass and its ability to warp reality is still such an incredibly clever concept. It leaves so much to the imagination in terms of the mirror's history and what it's capable of. And one of the things I really loved about the film was Karen's character, who approaches the mirror like someone who's seen horror movies. At the beginning of the film, she's already approaching it like a horror fan, devising plans and backup plans to take on The Lasser Glass. Can you talk about writing her character, obviously being a tremendous horror fan yourself? 

Mike Flanagan: We really respond to characters who respond to things the way we would, and that's tough in horror, to exactly your point. Most characters have to be naive about the genre that they're in or they wouldn't stay on screen long enough to experience the story. Scream was one of the first movies where I watched it and saw characters reacting the way I felt like I would react. They have in some cases an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre that they're inhabiting, and that made it so electric and fun to see how they were going to navigate their situation. And it puts more pressure on your antagonist too. Your monster has to be scarier. Your villain has to be smart. There's something savvy about it.

It was Tim [who had that mindset] in the [Oculus] short film, and this was my first real foray into the genre. I didn't want to make something that had the audience rolling their eyes or feeling like they were ahead of the characters. And then when we did feature development, Kaylie had that kind of prescience, but it was important then that Tim, while denying what was happening, wasn't doing it out of stupidity or naivety. He was still an intelligent person, but it's just that he'd rationalized this so well.

I thought, "If we could spend half the movie wondering who was correct, that could make it really exciting." Too frequently, not just in horror either, the movies that we watch tend to think too little of the viewer and they put characters out there who are clearly operating on a level that assumes a naivety in the audience and in the character, and people instinctively push that away. There's a level where if you do that enough, you can offend your audience deeply, and then there's an act of hostility toward the story. So it was important to avoid that.

I remember being in the theater and getting so excited when Karen starts setting up the trap. Watching it again, it was funny how much confidence she had in the plan and the science-based approach, when it didn't work out for her. 

Mike Flanagan: It didn't quite work out for her, but it was a good plan.

It's interesting, because everyone thinks they have a good plan for how to deal with a ghost or Freddy Krueger or an alien, but you're really out of your depth.

Mike Flanagan: Well, if you're imposing reason and logic onto a being that is not bound by those things the way human beings are, you're going to lose in the end. I thought that was fun too, that it's like she approaches it in very human terms for all of her planning. It's very cause and effect based, and it assumes a very clear, very human agenda on the part of the mirror and for the most part, that works for her. But that's the thing about the uncanny, you can't apply human filters to it.

You've talked previously about playing Bloody Mary when you were young. For 70s and 80s kids, I think everybody tried it at least once or twice, and I was wondering how that may have informed your fascination with mirrors as a horror device.

Mike Flanagan: Yeah, we did it when we were kids. It was my cousins who first turned me onto it, but I remember doing it at several key points growing up and being terrified every time. It plants seeds into a child's mind that a mirror is a portal, which is a concept that I never could shake. 

From a filmmaking point of view, and playing things like that, there are movies like Candyman that have used this concept so brilliantly, and really demonstrate how anticipation is more effective than payoff. Pitting your rational mind against your subconscious and making that conflict come to the surface can create an incredible amount of suspense. And that was a feeling we wanted very much to carry into the movie because it's one of the most formative, frightening experiences I can remember as a kid, and it was fun.

Bloody Mary never showed up and never attacked me. However, it was incredible that, even just staring at a fixed point, there's an optical effect that happens and faces change. What you can do to trick the mind into creating your own horror story... that is the name of the game when it comes to making horror. It's not to pop out with something to terrify someone, it's how do you trick someone into terrifying themselves? How do you plant ideas in their head that, if we're really lucky, don't go away when the movie ends?

I also find it endlessly fascinating that what you're looking at in the mirror every day is not how people see you.

Mike Flanagan: 100% true. We think we know what we look like and we don't. The shock that I feel sometimes when I see another perspective of in footage and then I say, "Oh, right. That's how I look to the world." 

It's certainly not this kind of flattened, reversed, slightly distorted version. And when you're looking in an old mirror too, a mirror that's got flaws and age and isn't a completely smooth surface, you are being subtly warped in little ways that you do not see. This hotel [where the interview is taking place] is full of awesome antique mirrors. They're everywhere and they all have this patina, this kind of fingerprint, and a perfectly distinct way of distorting reality. But, we make a deal when we look into them that what we see is reality and it never is.

It's very cool and upsetting.

Thinking back to the making of the movie, I know it took some time to get this project off the ground. What was the challenge in taking that concept from the short and getting it greenlit as a feature film?

Mike Flanagan: The biggest challenge after making the short was getting someone to want to make the movie without making it a found footage film. It was the post-Paranormal Activity boom and there was this sense of like, "If it's scary and we can do it found footage, we can make this really cheap and we can make a lot of money." 

I didn't have a career outside of reality TV editorial work and so every time I was lucky enough to get in a room off the short, person after person would say, "We think the concept of a haunted mirror is cool. We love this." 

I would always pitch it as a portable Overlook Hotel, "We love that, and because there are cameras in the room, that's great. That means it’s an easy found footage story to tell." And it used to frustrate me so much because my whole concept is that reality would be distorted, and the thing about found footage is it's objective. What you see is what's happening. And so it was a very frustrating period of about six years of taking meetings and hearing that over and over again. It wasn't until I met with Intrepid Pictures and Trevor Macy that people wanted to do it right.

It's funny now because now Trevor and I have been working together ever since. But it was a long and frustrating road at a time when horror in Hollywood was being made to be as small as possible. So it was really tough to get somebody just to want to tell it as a narrative story, and then to get them to take a chance on someone who really just had one 20-minute digital short under his belt. To get it made in a way that would have a wide theatrical release, I look back at that now and I'm like, "That's wild that we were able to pull that off because today, no way." This would be a streaming movie, guaranteed.

Yeah, it's a different world now.

Mike Flanagan: It became a very different world so fast. And so I feel very lucky that we came in at the end of that era and were able to put this particular movie out into a wide-release theatrical market. That's nuts.

It also speaks to how strong of a film you created in Oculus.

Mike Flanagan: Well, thank you. I hope so, but the other thing I've learned over the last decade is that the film itself has very little to do with what kind of release it'll get, other than whether they think it can appeal to a wide audience. This movie on paper, that's not an intuitive decision. It doesn't check a lot of the boxes that today they would insist a movie check before it goes theatrical.

Was it a challenge to cast Karen Gillan and Sackhoff? Did it take a lot of convincing or were they on board right away?

Mike Flanagan: It was a big challenge. I am such a Whovian and Karen was the first name that I put up, and there was skepticism from the producers initially because she hadn't done movies. And they were like, "Yeah, Dr. Who of course has a big audience, but it was a television audience and will that translate into box office appeal?" Getting in touch with her was not difficult because Karen was looking to break into movies, and this was an opportunity to headline one. I do remember getting her to commit to it was challenging, because there was a lot of uncertainty about how the film would be executed.

On paper, the editing of the movie is very weird to read. I heard Karen was in LA and she had not yet committed to it and I said, "Please let me just run out and buy her a drink and just talk to her about it." And I met her at Chateau Marmont on Sunset, which to me was such a crazy Hollywood thing to do. I'd never done anything like that, and I pulled up in my beat-up little car to Chateau Marmont. She walked in and she said, "I have some friends joining me in a little bit. Is that okay?" And I said, "Sure." And we talked about the movie and she said, "I think I really want to do it. Let's see if we can make it work." And then her friends showed up and they were Matt Smith and Arthur Darvill, and I completely fell apart. I couldn't talk.

I had no idea that morning when I got up that I would be meeting her that day. It was a very spontaneous thing, and I was wearing a Doctor Who T-shirt with Matt Smith's face on it. That's just what I had put on. And I didn't realize that I was wearing it until he sat down and introduced himself and then kind of stared at my shirt a little bit and I was like, "I'm completely exposed here. Any illusion of Karen meeting a director who is considering her for a part in this American movie has completely crumbled in the face of the reality that they're sitting with a huge fanboy who's just freaking out to be at the table." They were very kind and I ended up staying out with them most of the night because I offered to drive them to the clubs they were going to. I was like, "I'll be your chauffeur." I just really, really worked against my self-interest here, but it was one of the coolest nights of my young nerdy life at the time.

With Katee, I was a huge Battlestar fan and she was eager to get into movies, having just done the show for so long. There was a lot of questions about, "How does this movie work? With these two timelines, how will the editing work?" But Katee was game and I really didn't do myself any favors. When she finally showed up on set, we were going to have our first actor-director conversation and I said, "Let's get some coffee." She said, "Sure."

There are four coffee shops next to our production office, but I drove 20 minutes past all the coffee shops to go to Starbucks, and she was like, "Why aren't we stopping at these others?" I was like, "Let's keep driving." And we ordered, as we sat down and I'm sitting there just grinning, she said, "Wait a minute. You just did the getting Starbucks at Starbucks with Starbuck thing, didn't you?" And I'm like, "Yes. I'm so sorry. When would I ever have this chance again?" And so we took a selfie at Starbucks and then it was like, "Now let's talk as professional collaborators," but I'd already ruined it.

I'm so happy to hear about that though, because as much as I try to maintain composure, sometimes I just geek out meeting or talking with certain people, and I'm just happy to hear that you have stories like that too.

When you look back at the filming of the movie, do you have any favorite memories that stick out? Was it a fun shoot?

Mike Flanagan: It was one of the more fun shoots of all of them. I was terrified. I had no idea what I was doing, so every day I had this sense that, "Don't fuck this up," but I was doing it with some of my best friends now like Michael Fimognari, who's a DP, and we've worked together now our whole career. It was the beginning of a lot of beautiful friendships on that set, so I was in great hands, and I had a blast. I remember the daily joy of it and the thrill, this surreal thrill, that I was making a movie, which is all I'd wanted to do since I was a kid.

There was this sense to pinch myself every day and just be like, "It's happening. It's happening. Don't fuck it up. Don't ruin this movie." The cast was great. Everybody got along, which is not always the case. I didn't know that then. I always thought how could people have any other feeling than feeling really happy to be there making a movie for a living? Which is not always the case. How little I knew, but I remember it very fondly and pleasantly. We had budgetary challenges, but nothing major. We didn't have any big disasters and we didn't shut down. There weren't any big accidents. It was as easy and gentle a way in as I can imagine.

You're very right that not all film sets are like that and I'm glad to hear it was such a wonderful experience.

Mike Flanagan: It was ideal. I remember it very fondly and it was very nice working with some of those same people again over the years and having that touch point to go back to. There are other people I haven't worked with again who I would love to. I loved working with Rory Cochran. We had a great time, and the only reason Rory hasn't been back is that he's been booked whenever I've come around with a new project. I love James Lafferty. We worked together a couple times after that in smaller ways. Brenton Thwaites was such a sweet guy. I think of him now and he was a baby back then. We were all babies back then, but it was just a lot of really good people. Miguel Sandoval, who opened the movie, I was just freaking out about because of his body of work in Get Shorty and Jurassic Park. It was great. I look back at it now, nostalgia does that, but it seems simpler and a lot more innocent, than a lot of the production experiences that I remember more freshly.

I'm sure you've thought about where the Lasser Glass could wind up next. Is a sequel something that you think is realistically in the cards?

Mike Flanagan: We've talked about it over the years. There's a question of rights with Relativity completely imploding.

There's some murkiness about who owns the movie. I know places that have tried to screen the film have had to navigate some kind of crazy labyrinthian thing to get a print or to get to the right person to get the DCP. So I don't know what that looks like, but creatively, it would be fascinating to me. 

One of the ways I tried to keep it alive was to keep hiding the mirror in other places and in other stories. What I loved about Oculus from the beginning was that the number of stories were limitless. You could tell stories backwards and forwards in time that would be as individual and unique as the person encountering the mirror.

By the time we finished Before I Wake, we could have very easily pivoted to another Oculus then, but Relativity went bankrupt and it was sold off for parts in a lot of ways, and we didn't know where those parts were going. No one talked to us. So I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it would take a bit of research to figure out how to do it.

I hope that you're able to do it.

Mike Flanagan: I'd love to go back to that world. We made three mirrors for the movie. One of them broke years later and it broke my heart. I have one in my house, and then there's one that travels that's in storage. It goes to set and we hang it up in the other shows. We've got two left, so that's enough to make a movie.

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If you haven't seen Oculus or would like to revisit, I highly recomend checking it out and it's available across multiple VOD services (Amazon, Google, Vudu, Apple), as well as Blu-ray and DVD.