Whereas Mike Flanagan‘s myriad Netflix collection do share sure similarities, every undertaking up to now has confirmed to have its personal distinctive DNA. That’s partly why his newest, The Midnight Membership, was by no means conceived as The Haunting of Brightcliffe Hospice. The truth is, the concept of together with it as one other installment of his acclaimed Haunting anthology was by no means even on the desk.
“That is the primary time that’s ever crossed my thoughts!” the author/director mentioned at a current press occasion at Netflix’s New York Metropolis headquarters.
“Our factor with the Haunting is that we at all times wished it to be based on a chunk of basic horror literature, and ideally one thing that has been tailored earlier than that we are able to do one thing completely different with,” he mentioned. “After we consider the Haunting, we take into consideration authors like [Edgar Allan] Poe and [Charles] Dickens, contemporaries which are extra within the Henry James, Shirley Jackson world. The opposite standards with it’s that it has to primarily be about ghosts. That query got here up with The Fall of the Home of Usher as a result of that was based mostly on Poe. It’s simply not a ghost story, and so, there’s no haunting there. [The Midnight Club] was at all times its personal factor.”
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However that doesn’t imply the door is shut on a future installment. Whereas there aren’t any present plans for a follow-up to 2018’s The Haunting of Hill Home and 2020’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, the subject incessantly arises for the staff at Intrepid Footage, whose essential heads embrace Flanagan and CEO Trevor Macy.
“What makes the Haunting the Haunting, and if and the way we might re-approach it’s one thing we discuss fairly incessantly as a result of we’ve at all times left that door open,” mentioned Flanagan. “[But] we don’t wish to do it simply to do it.”
Added Macy: “Not every little thing is the Haunting. We wrestle with that fairly a bit as a result of it could be nice to do one other one, however you must be rigorous about what it’s and what it isn’t.”
Flanagan final chimed in about the way forward for the anthology in a December 2020 tweet. “In the mean time there aren’t any plans for extra chapters,” he wrote on the time. “By no means say by no means, in fact, however proper now we’re centered on a full slate of different @intrepid tasks for 2021 and past. If issues change we’ll completely let everybody know!”
Would you wish to be regaled with one other Haunting of… story? What piece of literature ought to the staff deal with subsequent? Drop some feedback under!