Mike Flanagan’s Ghost Stories and Their Homage to Grief

One of the joys of film and television is that they’re beautiful art forms that can communicate some of the most personal messages to their audiences. We can see ourselves in different pieces of media and  eagerly watch as familiar feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, and humor unfold before us on our screens. It’s comforting to witness just how universal the human experience can be as we find ourselves connecting with fictional characters and stories. Nevertheless, I’ve found that while there are so many moving narratives that have been told through film and television, there has always been one emotion that has never felt adequately portrayed: grief.

I’ve experienced my fair share of loss during the past decade of my life, so I usually find myself depending on art to help me understand and process my emotions. But nothing I watched ever truly encapsulated the wild, neverending rollercoaster of emotions that comes with grief. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that topics like loss and death are touchy subjects that many people (understandably) aren’t comfortable talking about, so perhaps they’d never be conveyed through cinematic art in the way that I so desperately wanted (and needed). Enter into the scene: filmmaker Mike Flanagan and the Haunting anthology.

Flanagan began his venture into ghostly anthologies with the release of The Haunting of Hill House in 2018. He created, directed, wrote, edited, and executive produced the series. I binge watched the entire season on Netflix within a matter of days. What I expected was a scary, supernatural horror television adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic 1959 novel. What I got was exactly that… except there were also heavy themes of grief and loss that I wasn’t expecting at all. There’s this one theory about each main character being a depiction of one of the stages of grief so, yeah, it was a lot for me to process. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when Flangan’s latest addition to the Haunting anthology was released onto Netflix, with this show being loosely based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The Haunting of Bly Manor features some of the same extremely talented actors from Hill House as they portray new characters who must come to terms with Flanagan’s repeated usage of the multifaceted theme of grief. The ghostly love story that takes place in Bly Manor is so different from the story told in Hill House, but I was once again able to easily connect with these new characters and their battles with loss, acceptance, and guilt. (And yes, I cried. A lot.)

Although I started watching this anthology series because I have a genuine love for the horror genre, I left both shows feeling so unexpectedly seen. Grief is not an easy topic to think or talk about. It is full of unexplainable feelings that I never thought anyone could understand, and yet I felt so understood after watching this series. The manner in which grief and loss were dealt with by Flanagan’s brilliant writing and directing was poignant, raw, and unflinchingly real, and the actors in these shows conveyed those emotions in the most stunningly powerful ways. After so many years of needing to see an accurate depiction of the depths of my own grief, watching this series was finally that ‘Ah ha! That’s it!’ moment for me.

I am endlessly grateful to Mike Flanagan and the cast and crew of the Haunting anthology. These shows helped me start to understand the complexities of my own grief, and they taught me something that I will never forget: “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.”

The ways in which I’ve been able to learn how to cope with my own grief have stemmed directly from these shows. I sincerely hope that anyone else struggling with grief is able to find that same sense of comfort and understanding, too.

 

• grief
• horror
• Netflix
• television
• the haunting of hill house