On paper, none of Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptations should have worked — and yet for Constant Readers, and often the general population, they excelled. Gerald’s Game was seen as impossible to film, taking 25 years (and half of Flanagan’s life) to make it to the screen. Doctor Sleep is a tightrope-walking sequel to one of the greatest scary movies of all time, one that significantly altered King’s book and resulted in decades of disses. The Life of Chuck is bizarre, brief, and beautiful; the author called it a “miracle that such a strange piece of work should become a film.” And the new Carrie show…well, nobody knew better than Flanagan and King that the story didn’t need a remake. What it begged for, a half-century after the novel and Brian De Palma’s entry in the horror-cinema canon, was to be radically reimagined — a first for Flanagan inside the SK sandbox.
“I want to take excellent care of my little corner of the King universe,” the writer/director/editor said upon entering the arena with Gerald’s Game in 2017, “but I really so desperately want to kind of fire off little flares into the other areas of the universe that are already connected to the story.” He continued to do exactly that, planting Dark Tower-isms in each project. Now he’s playing with much heavier ammunition than little flares. In Carrie, there’s a tectonic twist on a story beat we all thought we knew. At a climactic moment, a newly invented character tells one of the stars, “Hey, let me help. Let me take the wheel, okay?”
In a way, that’s what Flanagan has started doing with King’s work onscreen.
“I have right of disapproval over everything,” the 79-year-old King, an executive producer on Carrie, recently told the New York Times in a joint interview. “And basically I don’t use it, because I trust Mike completely. He is the King whisperer.” (“In Flanagan We Trust” is a motto among the faithful. It’s on T-shirts.) On Twitter the day before, he called 48-year-old Flanagan “the best adapter of my work.”
Flanagan will continue reimagining from here. He’s drafting a new version of The Mist and knows “there’s zero point in remaking” Frank Darabont’s 2007 version. That one’s still blowing people away and crushing their souls with the Shawshank Redemption/Green Mile filmmaker’s cruel twist ending. “If there wasn’t an excellent answer to ‘why,’ I wouldn’t do it,” Flanagan said.
One answer is as big as it gets: building inroads to The Dark Tower. Carrie has already done it in a major way, and The Mist is primed to do the same. Mike has the rights to King’s magnum opus and told the Flanagan’s Wake podcast he’s tirelessly working to secure the commitment required for “the consuming project of my career” and the “most intimidating creative endeavor I can imagine.” The eight Tower books and directly affiliated tales (including this month’s tie-in Other Worlds Than These) span decades and genres, with tendrils reaching into King’s whole body of work.
Flanagan’s original material — stuff like Midnight Mass, Hush, and Oculus — is more than enough to sustain a career. But the man he now simply calls Steve “shaped my entire understanding of storytelling,” Flanagan said nearly a decade ago. “I can still see that influence in everything I do.” In a business where executives detrimentally prize established intellectual property above all, Flanagan’s found the most satisfying way to play ball, a genuine creative mission that speaks to his soul. Asked in a new Reddit AMA what makes his and King’s “storytelling style so compatible,” he answered, “At his heart, Stephen King is an optimistic humanist. He is always writing about the nature and potential of the human being, and he believes in courage, honor, and love — and that ordinary people can stand against unspeakable evil and win, even though they’re outmatched. I agree with him fundamentally.”
SK and MF are such a strong match that even the most ardent Flanafans have a hard time with him tackling other IP. How many were clamoring for Flanagan to do a DC villain origin story, even if only via screenplay? (Clayface will mark the first time he’s written a movie but not directed it.) Or Warhammer 40,000, or another stab at The Exorcist so soon after the last failed attempt? Probably not a lot. But here’s the thing — the way King’s works feed into each other to create a rich multiverse, the Flanaverse does the same, no matter the source material or lack thereof. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a main player in The Life of Chuck, and would be a top candidate for Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, in The Dark Tower; he’s also starring in The Exorcist: Martyrs next year. Carla Gugino led Flanagan’s first King movie, then anchored The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher. Samantha Sloyan, the quintessential member of the Flanafam, is our brilliant new Margaret White; her biggest prior roles all came in Flanagan’s non-King properties. Rereading King and seeing new connections is a big part of Constant Readership; the same goes for Flanagan’s oeuvre and the layers added with each new offering.
King, of course, wrote many, many non-Tower books. The times he returned to Roland’s journey were frequently his most special, alien, rewarding, and imagination-stirring, but everything fed into everything else. That’s happening with Flanagan. Will The Dark Tower get made? Nobody knows. But the Flanaverse is already real, and the Venn diagram’s got a lot of overlap. In December 2020, I published a piece breaking down the strokes of genius in Doctor Sleep — how the director’s cut contains one of the best SK moments that SK himself never wrote. “The Stephen King renaissance has been in full swing, the closest thing to a genuine SK Cinematic Universe is imminent, and Flanagan is poised to be its lynchpin,” I wrote.
To illustrate how the Carrie experiment went, I’d turn to a remark made about King on a Losers’ Club podcast episode celebrating the 50th anniversary of his debut novel: “He’s warming up for some really big shit. You can just kind of feel that this is the start of something,” said Mel Kassel, who asserted that Carrie had signaled “something huge and potent.”
This applies perfectly to Flanagan, and his Red Room Pictures banner, and his troupe of ongoing collaborators — actors, writers, directors, the composer duo the Newton Brothers, the cinematographer Michael Fimognari. Carrie is a new beginning, and a warm-up for some really big shit.
Zach Dionne writes Decider’s Streamin’ King column and makes King things on Patreon, including The Dark Tower Mixtape.