Mike Flanagan’s 10-Episode Netflix Thriller Masterpiece Is Everything ‘Carrie

Mike Flanagan knows how to make horror. He also knows how to make serialized TV. His most recent show is a mix of most of the things we’ve come to love about him: his bond with Stephen King, his skills as an adapter, his great eye for casting, and his ability to deliver pathos. But one key thing is missing: fear.

Carrie came out in October of this year, sparking much conversation, with many praising how it brought King’s ‘70s novel to 2026. One of its major criticisms, though, is that it’s not scary, especially for Flanagan, a guy who’s known for making some truly spooky stuff. Case in point: The Haunting of Hill House.

Ghosts in plain sight

Released on Netflix in 2018, The Haunting of Hill House was Flanagan’s first TV show. Based on Shirley Jackson’s landmark novel of the same name, Flanagan takes her characters and reimagines them, at times scrapping their identities completely. While Jackson collected a group of strangers in a haunted house to explore their deepest traumas, Flanagan turned them into siblings, transforming Hill Houseinto a story about their childhood home.

It’s an adaptational choice that many hardcore Jackson fans don’t forgive. Still, if Flanagan does one thing, it’s commit fully to the haunted house concept, taking the psychological fear that permeates the novel and literalizing it. Hill House is a true house of horrors.

Rather than leaning on jump scares, Hill House runs on dread, the type that has your eyes scanning through every inch of the screen so you’re not caught off guard by something that looks out of place. “If you go back and watch the series again, in every episode there’s probably somewhere between eight and 10 ghosts that are just hidden in plain sight that we called no attention to but they’re there,” Flanagan told Bloody Disgusting.

Flanagan also revealed that the ghosts had personal origins. The tall man with the bowler hat was added because one of the writers is afraid of tall people. “People on stilts freak her out,” he said. “It’s one of the most specific and weird phobias I’ve heard. We all thought it was so funny that we decided to make the tall man.”

And while Hill House delivers plenty of scary ghosts for texture and disquiet, some pull double duty, driving the story too. Flanagan splits Jackson’s Eleanor in two characters, giving her instability to the Crain siblings’ mother, Olivia (Carla Gugino), and her frailty and imagination to Nell (Victoria Pedretti). He turns the latter into the perfect example of a house cannibalizing its weakest. The series’ standout episode, “The Bent-Neck Lady,” relies on the twist that (spoiler alert) the ghost that has haunted Nell her entire life is herself, driven mad and killed by the house. Hill House’s biggest twist makes the horror intimate. Carrie’s twist does the opposite, removing the horror from her completely.

Prom in 2026

Warning: Spoilers follow for Carrie’s final episodes.

While Flanagan’s Carrie sticks closer to the book, keeping its mythology, sequence of events, and its characters' identities, it veers off in the one place it shouldn’t: the prom. We spend an entire season building up to one of the most famous moments in horror history, only for the series to unnecessarily complicate it. Instead of making the prom the place where Carrie breaks and enacts her revenge, it’s Emaline (Thalia Dudek), Carrie’s friend, who bears the majority of the blame, taking over Carrie’s body for most of the massacre.

In an interview with Polygon, Flanagan discussed the prom scene at length, clarifying what had happened. He shared that he and the writers wanted Carrie to be "100% solely responsible for" the deaths of key characters, innocent and guilty alike, including Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti) and Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton).

They drew the line at the prom massacre. "None of us believed the Carrie White we created would consciously choose to kill Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard), would choose to kill Ms. D (Amber Midthunder), and would choose to ignite innocent people around her,” he said.

Carrie has always been more than a story about a girl setting her prom on fire. It’s about the cruelty of high schoolers who use their weaker peers to feel better about themselves. That comes through in Flanagan’s show; as with Hill House, he has the ability to make us care deeply about his characters. But the prom is the moment where all that cruelty infects Carrie, where she transcends the page and becomes a horror icon. It’s there the show flinches. There’s no Bent-Neck Lady moment, just a massacre with no one clearly to blame. Is the show called Emaline?

The Haunting of Hill House is streaming on Netflix.