prophetic lunacy

short answer: Flanagan's "brand" as a filmmaker/TV writer is to take works of classic horror literature (The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw, The Fall of the House Of Usher, and now Carrie) mine them for parts, and then warp the core of the story until it no longer bears any thematic resemblance to the original. The Haunting of Hill House, a book about a woman who has been so stifled in her life (and in turn is stifling her own lesbianism) that she is consumed by the evil house and kills herself to become one with it. In Flanagan's version, it's about a family who all love each other very much, and at the end, the dead daughter reunites with her parents and the famous final line of the book - "those who walked there walked alone -" becomes "those who walked there walked together." The Turn of the Screw is about Victorian morality serving as a cover for child abuse, and in Flanagan's version, it's about how love transcends death. The Fall of the House of Usher is about the incestuous nature of the aristocracy, and how these families literally collapse in on themselves, and in Flanagan's version, it's about . . . pharmaceutical companies? I'll be honest, I gave up on that one after two episodes. The one thing I do remember is that he put all this emphasis on the shocking sexual deviance of the Usher family, which seemed to boil down to "watching your husband fuck other women" and "blood orgies at the club," but he did not seem to understand that just having outside the box sexual experiences isn't shocking, it's the actual content of those experiences and how they inform the way the participants treat each other. And now, with Carrie, he's taken a story about religiously motivated child abuse and vicious school bullying and turned it into "this mom just wants to protect her daughter!"

The throughline of Flanagan's work is cowardice: he is deathly afraid of depicting any kind of real harm without softening it to the point where it loses its ability to provoke a reaction. In The Midnight Club, his abortive adaptation of the Christopher Pike novel (abortive because it got cancelled after one season), his plan was apparently to reveal that these terminally ill teenagers were all going to be together in the afterlife anyways, so it's fine, don't even worry about the fact that they're facing death before they're even old enough to drive! In Hill House, rather than being driven to her death by social expectations and parental mistreatment, Nell dies because a ghost pushed her, and she has a whole scene where she comes back and tells her siblings that their conflicts in life were no big deal because they loved each other and "the rest is confetti." Even in stories with "tragic" endings, like Dani being possessed and dying in Bly Manor, he has to pull that punch by depicting her coming back to visit Jamie as a ghost. There is never a moment where his characters are forced to reckon with having caused actual harm to the people they love, because in the Flanaverse, that simply doesn't happen. It's all good.

Flanagan's storytelling also leans really hard on the supernatural as a driving force of anything that goes wrong: like I mentioned, Nell in Hill House goes from someone who was driven to her death by the people around her to someone who kills herself because a ghost possessed her and made her do it. Dani and Rebecca in Bly Manor are no longer caregivers who failed their charges at best and actively abused them at worst: now they're noble protectors who sacrifice themselves for the children. Based on what he's said about Carrie, I suspect we're going to get something similar here: Carrie isn't a victim of bullies or her mother, it's those darn psychic powers that ruined everything for her! He seems incapable of reckoning with the evil that men do, which is pathetic enough already in a grown man who's made his career as a horror writer, but especially insulting when he's "adapting" works with these themes. Patriarchy isn't a problem, child abuse isn't a problem, religious repression isn't a problem: it's all an outside evil coming in to ruin everyone's happy families, and if they just give each other a big enough hug, they can fix it.

Anyway, that's not a short answer at all, but it is why people are fed up with him.

like.

so.