The Haunting of Bly Manor's Mike Flanagan is one of the best horror filmmakers: He prioritizes empathy over cheap scares

The Ringer

"While he isn’t a household name, Flanagan has quickly emerged as one of horror’s most proficient filmmakers," says Miles Surrey. "His movies and TV shows don’t always crack critics’ year-end lists, but they’re largely well-received; he’s like an NBA player who’s carved out a successful career in spite of never making an All-Star team. Bly Manor might not be Flanagan’s apex—in fact, having written and directed only the first episode, it’s a far less strenuous commitment for him than Hill House, for which he directed every episode. But Bly Manor is very good television filled with unmistakable Flanagan trademarks that plays to one of the filmmaker’s greatest strengths: a commitment to empathy in a genre that’s too often deprived of it."

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• Why Bly Manor didn't work: "The Haunting of Bly Manor is not very good," says Proma Khosla. "That's partially because the source material itself is unremarkable, but the creative team behind Bly is not blameless. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is a baffling text to parse, let alone adapt for television, but we expected Mike Flanagan, creator of the mesmerizing Haunting of Hill House, to deliver something less overwhelming than the cluttered yet listless Bly."
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