Editorials
‘Hush’ Director Mike Flanagan Reveals the Secret to Creating Authentic Scares In a Horror Movie!
Halloween came early this year, thanks to Netflix. The streaming giant exclusively released Mike Flanagan’s slasher, Hush, about a def woman trapped in her house by a random attacker.
After delivering the indie Absentia, the filmmaker exploded into the genre scene with his haunting Oculus, and currently has Before I Wake awaiting release, while he also is in post on a sequel to Ouija. While he’s targeting horror, at the moment, he’s touching various subgenres along the way.
Hush is a slasher film that’s getting rave reviews, especially by horror audiences. It’s violent and scary, but most notably is it’s quite beautiful. It’s not a coincidence that they go hand in hand.
In light of the film’s impact, we wanted to know how Flanagan creates a scare sequence. We talked with him a bit to learn the secrets behind the horrors of Hush, which begins with staging out scenes before they’re even added to the screenplay.
“[Star and co-writer] Kate [Siegel] and I would act out various scenarios at our house in Glendale, and if it felt real, we’d put it into the script,” Flanagan explains about the early process of the inner workings of a sequence.
But that’s just the beginning. Once Flanagan knows how the sequence can play out on set, he utilizes a lack of sound and specific blocking to activate the viewer’s imagination.
“I think it’s all about silence, imagination (both mine and the viewer’s), and waiting,” he tells us when asked about how to shoot a scare scene. “The moments of violence only have impact if they’re earned. A lot of times, people try to accomplish these things with loud noises and jump scares, which I think is lazy. There’s nothing special about startling someone – it’s an involuntary reflex, and it immediately diffuses tension. They scream, then they laugh, then they giggle for fifteen seconds. To me – and I’m not in the majority, I realize – that pattern is toxic to the genre.”
Flanagan goes on to explain why this style of filmmaking is toxic, which goes to the top of the Hollywood food chain.
“Audiences have grown to equate being startled with being scared, and will complain that a movie ‘isn’t scary enough’ if it doesn’t have enough jump scares… so that means that a lot of studios will insist on shoving jump scares into a movie, regardless of character or story structure, thinking it ‘makes it scarier.’ This fundamental miscommunication between the audience and the studios has resulted in a very unfortunate trend in horror, in my opinion.”
This is where Flanagan differentiates himself from other filmmakers. Here, he reveals his tricks for creating and sustaining tension, which comes from creative camerawork.
“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,” Flanagan explains. “Sometimes you can’t avoid them, particularly if you want to make a movie that will be released wide, and that just makes me feel a little sad. But it is what it is…
“I think the far better approach is to work with the audience to create tension together. Give them enough ingredients to activate their imagination, and let them come along for the ride. Utilize negative space, darkness, and your camera to create opportunities for them to imagine (and thus fear) what COULD happen, as opposed to focusing entirely on what DOES. A viewer’s imagination is a powerful storyteller, and can often come up with things way more frightening than what you can explicitly show in a horror movie… try to engage that imagination, and the results can be magical.
“I’ve been surprised over the years to find that there are viewers out there who actively resent this approach, as if they’d prefer we leave their brains alone and let them have as passive an experience as possible… but hey, what can you do?”
Hush, now streaming on Netflix is a stunning and gorgeous piece of cinema that’s as thrilling and tense as they come. Kalyn reviewed the film, stating that “Silence is the most frightening tool of all,” while Trace explained that it’s “a fist-pumping female empowerment film while at the same time an incredibly suspenseful home invasion thriller.”
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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