Well, America has elected Donald Trump for a second time, and it seems the country as a whole is shifting much further to the right. As with the first Trump administration in 2016, we are likely to see a wave of sociopolitical filmmaking, from the cringe and the crazy to modern masterpieces. The horror genre has always been the most successful genre to appropriate allegorical commentary without sacrificing entertainment value, and one of the greatest horror directors of our time is ready to get political. Mike Flanagan, in his recent MovieWeb interview about his first novella, Rare, Fine, and Limited, expressed a strong desire to move from his more personal filmmaking to something more political, at least for now.
“Yes, I do. I wish today that I had done more of that sooner, not that I imagine it would have made a difference — I don’t. But I think one of the amazing powers of the genre is that we can have these kinds of conversations,” explained Flanagan about horror movies. The director behind three great Stephen King adaptations, a run of brilliant Netflix TV series (Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House), and modern horror classics like Oculus and Hush, understands the power of the genre to convey cultural, moral, and political meaning.
It feels impossible to stay quiet today.
“We can raise these ideas in a forum that reaches a huge number of people,” added Flanagan, “and that gets the idea onto the table through this delivery system of an entertaining genre, where, if you want to tell a story about racism in America, you can make that movie, you can tell that story, and the people that seek it out either agree with you going in or are curious to hear that conversation going in. But if you make Night of the Living Dead, the people coming in want to see a zombie movie, and they get it, and it’s scary, and it’s great. And when they’re driving home, realizing they’re thinking about racism in America because of where that story went and how it ended — that’s the beauty of genre.” Flanagan continued:
“I think The Fall of the House of Usher was the first time that I felt like I got overtly political in my storytelling, and I felt like I had something to say that was important, whether people would agree with it or not. I do have that hunger to do more of that. [Rare, Fine, and Limited] has a fair amount of that in it, and I find it to be exhilarating, and it makes me feel like I’m working on something with substance, and not just trying to figure out how to scare somebody, or how to make somebody cry.”
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“I’ve gotten to explore a lot of things in my work that are important to me, whether it’s trauma, family, grief, mortality, religion,” explained Flanagan. “And I guess Midnight Mass was also overtly political now that I mention it, but was way more about the politics of faith and about religion, the corruption of organized religions, alcohol as well. I’ve always had a lot to say about alcohol, whether I knew about it or not. It’s funny for me, looking back at older projects before I was sober and realizing that I was dealing with it then and didn’t see it until later. But yeah, I do hope to do [more sociopolitical horror], especially in today’s climate. It feels impossible to stay quiet today.”
Mike Flanagan & The Lovecraftian Horror of Late Stage Capitalism
Even before the 2024 election, Mike Flanagan has been thinking a lot about the trajectory of our society and the horrors of our economic system, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and even the working class exploit the labor and lives of workers around the world. It’s only likely to get worse. Within one day after Trump’s election, the top 10 richest people in the world gained $63 billion thanks to stock surges and other ramifications.
“The endless gluttony of capitalism has been on my mind for years, and we got to explore it to some extent in The Fall of the House of Usher. But that’s never left me as a point of fascination,” said Flanagan, whose novella is deeply related to this theme, following a wealthy hedonist who has profited off the suffering of others as he seeks the most exclusive, rarest wine in the world. Flanagan continued:
“I do think that there is an endless hunger to capitalistic thinking that goes beyond even possessions, goes beyond even the accumulation of things that are either wildly overvalued or have no discernible way to measure value, like an experience. When I think of the people who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a seat on a rocket ship that briefly orbits the planet, it’s like, ‘God, that would be an amazing experience.’ But you think about the price tag, and you think about the people who could drop what another family would pay to own a home to have this fleeting experience, and it raises a lot of really interesting questions to me about priorities and about waste and about the illusion of value.”
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“How much do we really need, how much do we really need to consume, and at what point is that consumption homicidal?” asked Flanagan. “At what point do our appetites cost lives? Yeah, our appetite for a new iPhone can cost a life on the other side of the world, and just because we’re not there in the immediate moment, does that mean we’re not at all culpable? You know, these are the questions that come with a society like ours and with a global economy like ours. All this stuff swirls around.”
Swirls around like dark, blood-red wine in an impossibly clear glass. Flanagan’s new 80-page horror novella is part of Find Familiar Spirits’ exclusive line of tequila, Macabre Spirits, from Matthew Lillard and Justin Ware. You can pre-order and find more information about it here.
- Release Date
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October 12, 2023
- Seasons
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1
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- Creator
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- Story By
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Edgar Allan Poe