MIKE FLANAGAN

For me it's about creating and sustaining tension for as long as possible, and I'm not generally interested in allowing that tension to be deflated, especially by a jump scare.

In high school, I started studying movies and not reacting to them emotionally.

I started off making backyard movies. I think it began in fifth grade - I'd get the friends together and we'd make little home movies. I always wanted to make movies but I didn't know how. It was always something really fun to do.

I'm always drawn toward family drama, and dysfunctional family stories. It speaks to me, in a really profound way, and I think there's so much to explore within it.

Well, I'm always drawn to the drama first. A story is really only interesting to me, if you can remove all of the genre moments and remove the supernatural element, and it still works. Then, I'm interested.

Well, as a kid I did all the Bloody Mary games and using a mirror to scare yourself.

I do not have the female experience. I don't, and I strive to understand it, but I'll never truly be able to. I don't think any men will, really.

For me, 'The Haunting of Hill House' is a series about life after a haunting, what happens after the credits roll in most horror films.

We always try to leave room for the actors to come in and make discoveries on set, in their interpretation of the scene. The shot list is scaffolding.

I always tend to tilt dark on an ending, because I feel like, especially with horror movies, those are the endings that don't evaporate. Those are the ones that stick with you.

It's a wonderful thing to watch an actor just act.

Audiences are savvy. You can never go wrong assuming the best of them.

At home, people are more likely to be distracted than in a theatrical environment. They're checking their phones, pausing to get a snack, or sometimes jumping from show to show.

I'm wide open to evidence of the supernatural, but I also think that the majority of those experiences are probably natural phenomena we don't understand just yet.

When I first started out and would go on pitch meetings, there was always this kind of eye-roll that would come with pitching a horror movie when you were dealing with the studios. Unless it was viewed as a cheap product that could turn a lot of profit, there wasn't a lot of interest in making it good.

My gravity is always towards original material but 'Gerald's Game,' I read it when I was nineteen years old, I got to the end and had gooseflesh up and down my arms and the back of my neck, I put it down and said 'That's one of my favourite Stephen King novels... it's also unfilmable.'

Horror movies feel like comedies when you're making them because everybody laughs so much.

I'm sure many more people saw 'Hush' in the first weekend it was on Netflix than saw 'Oculus' in theatres.

With digital technology there's a huge spectrum of flexibility in what you can do to manipulate sound and image - which you can push into a really artificial realm if you aren't careful.

When horror is about something - capital-A about - that's when it's really landing.

Depending on how 'Doctor Sleep' does, we'll see what movie opportunities there will be.

Building and sustaining tension is always my priority, so home entertainment provides challenges to that.

I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.

When I read Doctor Sleep, when it was first published, I was so taken with getting to spend time with Danny Torrance again.

I'm a firm believer that what you don't see is always scarier than what you do.