“Braindead”: the 2021 scene Mike Flanagan called “the stupidest thing I’d ever shot”
His might not be a name that a lot of people instantly recognise, but the writer and director Mike Flanagan is probably responsible for providing more nightmares than anyone else over the last ten years, maybe even more than Donald Trump.
That’s because with the likes of Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House and Gerald’s Game, he’s dedicated his time to making as many nail-chewing, ‘I’ll just be behind the sofa’ TV shows and movies as he possibly can, often using the work of the ‘Master of Horror’ himself Stephen King as a basis, and he shows no sign of stopping any time soon either, the complete sadist.
He’s been at it since 2011, when he crowd-funded the release of Absentia, a horror based on a series of short movies he’d put together not long after graduating college. Made on a budget of just $70,000, it was scary enough that Netflix picked it up, and enough people streamed it that Flanagan was able to make his next movie, 2013’s Oculus, for $5million, which proved a masterstroke when the supernatural horror starring Karen Gillan brought in $44m at the box office.
Flanagan, who was in his mid-30s by now, was smashing it, already starting on his next project, which he titled Somnia, an incredibly dark story of a young couple who take in a foster child after their own son drowns in an accident, Don’t Look Now-style. Unfortunately, the director, who had worked without interference to great success on his early movies, began to suffer the consequences of major studios wanting their say in his films.
After showing some of the rushes of the movie, which starred Kate Bosworth and The Mist’s Thomas Jane, feedback came in about the boy in the film, named Cody, who is able to manifest his dreams and nightmares into reality. As Flanagan recounted in his blog: “The note came in: ‘We need a scare set piece to occur when he is awake.’”
Flanagan tried to tell the studio that would defy the entire premise of the movie, adding: “Their rationale (such as it was) was that the audience wouldn’t ever be frightened when Cody was awake, because they knew the monsters only came when he was asleep. ‘Well yeah,’ I said, ‘That’s why it’s important that the movie isn’t just about scares.'”
“They were insistent. If a monster showed up while Cody was awake, that would be ‘truly thrilling’… It was the equivalent of saying ‘the shark in Jaws only attacks people if they’re in the water, we need an attack on land.'”
Mike Flanagan
Because Flanagan was still in the early stages of his career, he agreed to work in a scene where the boy was attacked by an evil spectre in his bed while wide awake, worrying that if he didn’t, the studio would refuse to release the movie in cinemas. In order to make it make sense, other scenes earlier in the film had to be reshot, and the concept of waking dreams had to be introduced. Flanagan was deeply unhappy with the result, and worse was to come.
The studio also weren’t satisfied with the title of the film, deciding it had to be changed, and once filming was complete, the movie was acquired by a distributor who then promptly went bankrupt. Almost three years passed, and still the film wasn’t out, with Flanagan engaging in a public Twitter row with the CEO of the distributor. Eventually, once Netflix acquired Before I Wake, it was released in 2018, five years after filming finished.
Flanagan still looks back at that one scene in particular however, saying:, “We filmed it, and I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever shot (it wasn’t, though – the stupidest thing I’ve ever shot remains the on-screen stalking and murder of a cat in the pilot of (2021 miniseries) Midnight Mass, a truly braindead scene that Netflix insisted on adding).”
The director is now working hard on bringing two classic franchises back to screens, one being another Stephen King adaptation, this time of his first novel Carrie, which will be a TV series, and in 2027, a reworking of 1973’s seminal horror The Exorcist starring Scarlett Johansson.
