Wait why do you hate mike flannigan? Just curious
Because I think he sucks. I think he's a marketing-thirstrap who likes to use titles of horror classics to get some attention on his work, but he strips them of everything that makes them them, and fills it back up with vapid, unnuanced, trashy surface level bullshit. I love creative and liberal adaptation, but his "adaptations" are title and cultural-aura thefts to sell the absolute nothingness of his clumsy, clunky, tell-but-never-show stories. He's performative as hell (empty representation / tokenisation, apparently unaware discrimination glorified as awareness, empty rotating of cast and archetypes with no exploration whatsoever, empty gesturing at political/ social/ philosophical ideas with no actual significance or values).
Most important of all for the topic (since this was about horror), he's hailed as a master of horror when he's just so, so, so terribly bad at it. To me, he literally works AGAINST what horror is about—its complexity, its subversiveness. What he does is making palatable what should unsettle us, what should make us think further than ourselves. There's something fundamentally political and philosophical about horror; capitalising on its simplification-for-consumption is symptomatic of something uglier and culturally-spreading that I HATE. Flanagan is a perfect agent of that. Everything has to be streamlined, simplified, dichotomised and flattened. If you can't deal with hidden messages, with nuance and mystery, with subtext, with blurring boundaries to the point of discomfort to yourSELF, you can't do horror. Flanagan leaves nothing to mystery, to ugliness, to the unexplained or the many-explained, to rawness or openness and layers (for someone who pretends to adapt Shirley Jackson and Henry James, what a joke).
All in all, he just shoves his boring, expected, chain-made story beats down your throat, doesn't even bother with building a story beyond what he puts on screen (think even back to Hush, the complete lack of actual motivation from the aggressor, how fucking lazy can character writing be?). Then he razzle-dazzles that with a bit of gratuitous (and undeserved) shock-value on top to cover up his tracks, which just makes it more insulting. Tear-jerkers and animal death for success value? Yeah, as classy as everything else, I guess.
I feel like I've rambled a lot in this... okay enough bye