RANKED

Mike Flanagan Movies and Shows, Ranked

By Matt Oakes · October 30, 2026

Few filmmakers have done more to reshape modern horror than Mike Flanagan, and fewer still have done it on both the big and small screens. He came up through the indie trenches with the micro-budget Absentia before breaking out with Oculus, a haunted-mirror chiller that announced a filmmaker more interested in grief and memory than cheap jolts. From there he proved he could do almost anything: a home-invasion thriller with a deaf protagonist (Hush), a prequel that improbably fixed a toy-tie-in franchise (Ouija: Origin of Evil), and a run of Netflix limited series, from The Haunting of Hill House to The Fall of the House of Usher, that turned prestige TV into a playground for gothic horror and weeping monologues alike.

Flanagan has also become the most reliable Stephen King interpreter working today. He cracked the supposedly unfilmable Gerald’s Game, pulled off the impossible task of reconciling King’s The Shining with Kubrick’s in Doctor Sleep, and stepped outside horror entirely with The Life of Chuck, a tearjerker about the universe contained in one ordinary life. Most recently, he brought Carrie back to the screen as an eight-episode series for Prime Video. Across all of it, the trademarks are unmistakable: long, unbroken takes, ghosts hiding in plain sight, recovering addicts and lapsed believers, and a repertory company (Kate Siegel, Henry Thomas, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, and more) that follows him from project to project.

And he’s not slowing down. Flanagan penned the screenplay for DC’s horror swing Clayface, his take on The Exorcist starring Scarlett Johansson is set for March 2027, and a long-gestating Dark Tower adaptation remains on his docket. Here’s every Mike Flanagan movie and series, ranked.

Quick list:

The Haunting of Hill House (2018)
Midnight Mass (2021)
The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)
The Life of Chuck (2025)
The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)
Doctor Sleep (2019)
Gerald’s Game (2017)
Oculus (2014)
Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
Carrie (2026)
Hush (2016)
The Midnight Club (2022)

Critics and Audience scores from Rotten Tomatoes; ratings from IMDb. Scores as of October 2026.

12. THE MIDNIGHT CLUB (2022)

85%Critics 55%Audience 6.5IMDb

The Midnight Club (2022) still
Flanagan’s most YA effort, and his most uneven by a lot. Adapting Christopher Pike, the series checks a group of terminally ill teens into a hospice where they sneak out each midnight to trade scary stories, with a secret lurking in the mansion’s past. The anthology-within-a-show structure gives it range, though the stories vary wildly in quality, and the cast is warm enough to make the gut-punches land. Netflix’s cancellation left it dangling on a cliffhanger, which doesn’t help. A minor work from a major horror voice, and still worth a look for Flanagan completists.

11. HUSH (2016)

92%Critics 73%Audience 6.6IMDb

Flanagan strips the home-invasion thriller down to its bare essentials. Kate Siegel, who co-wrote the script with him, stars as Maddie, a celebrated author living in remote seclusion who has been deaf and mute since a bout of meningitis at 13. When a faceless killer (John Gallagher Jr.) turns up outside her woodland home, the stage is set for a mano-a-mano battle of wits: no lingering question of who the killer is (he’s nobody, and that’s what makes him so scary) and no stockade of drunker, dumber victims to offer up first. Gallagher’s deranged hunter is thoroughly human, purposefully lacking a backstory beyond the 13 suggestive scratches etched into his crossbow, while Siegel’s impressive turn gives audiences a convincing hero to rally behind. A repetitive second act (in and out of windows, then doors, then more windows) shows Hush lacks the supreme craftiness of Oculus, but its vivid sound design exploits Maddie’s silent world to deliver a minor onslaught of paranoia and dread. A thoroughly capable experiment in tearing a cliché down to its most basic components and building it back up with only the finest ingredients.▶ Watch on Netflix · Read the full review

10. CARRIE (2026)

85%Critics 86%Audience 7.9IMDb

Updating the Stephen King classic for the modern era with a social-media bullying bent, Mike Flanagan’s eight-episode reinterpretation hunts for new angles on Carrie’s mythology, framing each chapter with an example of women in extraordinary circumstances doing extraordinary things, only to be written off as frauds. It’s slicker and poppier (soundtrack included) than Flanagan’s best work, and while it’s an entertaining, if familiar, ride, it lacks the sharp writing of Midnight Mass or The Haunting of Hill House. Summer H. Howell is a wonderful find as Carrie, balancing innocence and rage, and Samantha Sloyan is admirably detestable as her militant mother, though Alison Thornton’s Chris is borderline cartoonishly evil. Competently made but rarely scary or inspired, it feels pretty basic, and the larger telekinetic sisterhood that takes Carrie under its wing (an invention not found in the book) muddles a story that’s fundamentally about bottled rage uncorking. The real problem is that this story never demanded eight episodes: Brian De Palma’s 98-minute 1976 film is just as rich, and arguably scarier and more impactful, in far less time.▶ Streaming on Prime Video

9. OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL (2016)

82%Critics 58%Audience 6.2IMDb

Flanagan’s Ouija begins with the Zander family, or the remainder of the family at least. Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) is a recent widow, living in a solid colonial with her two headstrong but wounded daughters. Together, they scam locals with not-so-legit séances using the power of custom furniture. Ouija: Origin of Evil is an awesome rarity in that it’s an excellent sequel to a truly horrible original film. Mike Flanagan (Hush, Oculus) mixes uncomfortable comedy with legitimate scares like a master while breakout star Lulu Wilson gives a performance sure to make you uneasy for days to come.▶ Watch on Netflix · Read the full review

8. OCULUS (2014)

75%Critics 54%Audience 6.6IMDb

Flanagan’s breakout takes one of horror’s oldest tricks, the creepy mirror, and makes it genuinely unnerving again. Kaylie (Karen Gillan) is convinced an ornate, demon-horned antique mirror drove her family to ruin, and she’s dead set on proving it alongside her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites), freshly released from a psychiatric hospital where he spent years unlearning those very “facts.” Flashbacks to their childhood find Rory Cochrane’s father sliding into madness with the shuddersome ambiance of the Overlook, while a tactful script stages the best scenes as a kind of auto-voyeurism: characters watching themselves, unsure whether they are where they think they are or trapped in the bodies they’re looking at. Once the mirror takes hold, there’s no telling make-believe from reality. More Psycho than Scream, it ranks the “huh?” over the gore and lets dread prevail over cheap scares, sliding along with remarkable pacing. Oculus does for mirrors what Hitchcock did for showers: we’re not afraid of them, they’re just a little creepier now.

▶ Watch on Netflix · Read the full review

7. GERALD’S GAME (2017)

91%Critics 69%Audience 6.5IMDb

Stephen King’s “unfilmable” novel, filmed. Carla Gugino gives a career-best performance as a woman left handcuffed to a bed in a remote lake house after her husband’s (Bruce Greenwood) getaway plans end with him dead on the floor. Flanagan turns one room into a pressure cooker, letting Gugino argue with hallucinated versions of herself and her husband while a hungry stray dog and something far worse lurk at the edges. Then comes the escape sequence, one of the most wince-inducing stretches in modern horror. Talky in spots, but ferociously acted and expertly wound.

▶ Streaming on Netflix

6. DOCTOR SLEEP (2019)

79%Critics 89%Audience 7.3IMDb

Doctor Sleep, an adaptation of King’s 2013 novel of the same name, recaptures that relatable human horror, and in the confident hands of Mike Flanagan, digs even deeper into the psyche of its troubled principal characters. Older and beaten down by life, Danny (Ewan McGregor) faces demons both literal and metaphorical. With forceful dramatic inertia and a thoughtful depiction of trauma and addiction, Doctor Sleep is not your average horror movie. But what less can you expect from Mike Flanagan? That it’s a long and slow journey may turn certain viewers off, but those looking for a horror movie with soul have come to the right place.▶ Watch on Paramount+ · Read the full review

5. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (2023)

91%Critics 81%Audience 7.9IMDb

Mike Flanagan’s final collaboration with Netflix may not have been his best (that honor likely goes to Midnight Mass) but it was a suitable capstone to his anthological horror work with the streamer. The horror auteur’s redux of the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name migrates the story to center on a modern Pharma dynasty to tell a supernatural saga of moral compromise and mortal recompense. Assembling his regular cast for what may be the last time only to slay them all in increasingly jaw-dropping manner isn’t used just for shock and awe. No, Flanagan still finds a way to make it all poetic, prosaic, and profound. And, of course, gory as hell.See it in my Ten Best TV Shows of 2023

4. THE LIFE OF CHUCK (2025)

80%Critics 88%Audience 7.3IMDb

Mike Flanagan has always had a unique way of looking at death. From his first breakout series, The Haunting of Hill House, to his more mainstream horror features (Oculus, Doctor Sleep), he’s seen ghosts not as ghastly specters but as existential hangovers. A whispered celebration of life that doubles as an affirmation of its titanic meaning. Mike Flanagan adapts a not-so-scary Stephen King story to tremendous effect with The Life of Chuck, crafting an ethereal, poetic drama that juxtaposes the vastness of time and the universe against the quiet importance of a single human life. The cast is outstanding, the story is profound, the direction is assured, and the result pulses with the beauty, messiness, and meaning of being alive.▶ Watch on Hulu · Read the full review

3. THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR (2020)

88%Critics 69%Audience 7.4IMDb

Mike Flanagan did it again with The Haunting of Bly Manor, a gothic love story of the tallest order. A beautiful and haunting ode to loss and grief, this second anthological horror series may not have smuggled as much outright terror as The Haunting of Hill House but Victoria Pedretti’s tragic turn as manor nanny Dani gave the series an extra dose of heart and pathos that made the whole story pack that much more emotional punch. I loved every second of it.See it in my 25 Best TV Shows of 2020

2. MIDNIGHT MASS (2021)

87%Critics 79%Audience 7.7IMDb

Horror auteur Mike Flanagan is no stranger to long-form storytelling, delivering two knock-out Netflix series in The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. But he may have created his most masterful masterpiece with his third outing, the philosophical and nightmarish Midnight Mass. Flanagan takes his time unspooling this story of a lonely ex-con who returns to the windswept island community he swore off years ago but the viewer’s patience is rewarded and then some. The North Star of Midnight Mass is Flanagan’s writing, especially when his usual suspect ensemble is delivering on this level. The show’s MVP, Hamish Linklater gives an absolutely towering performance as Father Pruitt.See it in my Best TV Shows of 2021

1. THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (2018)

93%Critics 91%Audience 8.5IMDb

Not just Mike Flanagan’s masterpiece, The Haunting of Hill House is the best horror show ever made. Loosely adapting Shirley Jackson’s novel, Flanagan splinters the Crain family across two timelines, the summer they fled a haunted mansion and the grief-wrecked adults they became, and lets the dread metastasize episode by episode until every sibling’s wound feels like your own. It is genuinely, pull-the-blanket-up terrifying (ghosts lurk in the backgrounds of dozens of shots, waiting for you to notice them), yet it’s just as devastating as a family drama, with Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Timothy Hutton, Victoria Pedretti, and Oliver Jackson-Cohen delivering performances that would be the envy of any prestige series. Then there’s “The Bent-Neck Lady,” the show’s pinnacle and the single greatest hour of horror television ever made, a gut-punch that recontextualizes everything before it (go in blind, trust me). “Two Storms,” with its staggering, near-uninterrupted long takes, is a close second. Ten hours that scare you, break you, and then put you back together, and the yardstick every horror series since has been measured against.

FAQ

What is the best Mike Flanagan movie or show?

By my ranking, The Haunting of Hill House (2018) is Flanagan’s best work, with Midnight Mass a close second. On the film side, The Life of Chuck leads the pack.