Stephen King believes Mike Flanagan is “the Quentin Tarantino of horror”
If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, it’s another Quentin Tarantino imitator. We got past that by the end of the 1990s, but for Stephen King, a new pretender to the throne has emerged and made their bed in his genre of choice.
Hollywood, and the people who dwell within, love few things more than jumping on a bandwagon and riding it until the wheels fall off. Naturally, when whip-smart dialogue and nonlinear narratives gained prominence after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, it became the default setting for independent cinema.
As always tends to be the case, it grew old very quickly, although some of the Tarantino knockoffs did impress the man himself, even if it didn’t always work out too well for those filmmakers in the long run. King isn’t making a direct comparison, though, but implying that they’ve got similar approaches to two very different arenas of storytelling.
Tarantino became one of his era’s definitive filmmakers by retaining creative control, sticking to his guns, and authoring his films unlike anyone else. Horror is an art form that suffers greatly from predictability and the law of diminishing returns, and King finally catching up on a TV series that premiered in 2023 emboldened him to make a claim that’s derailed plenty of aspiring auteurs in the past.
“I missed this when it bowed due to hip surgery, but this is a case of delayed gratification,” the author wrote on social media after finally sitting down to enjoy Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. “Scary, involving, with writing that’s witty and moves the plot. There’s a case to be made for Mike Flanagan being the Quentin Tarantino of horror.”
That’s probably music to Flanagan’s ears, with the writer, director, and producer having grown up as a massive fan of King’s work before using his burgeoning career to tackle several adaptations. So far, he’s overseen Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck, and he’s also tackling episodic reboots of Carrie and The Dark Tower, so it’s an understatement to say they’re becoming two peas in a terrifying pod.
Flanagan’s early features, like Oculus, Hush, and Ouija: Origin of Evil, established him as one of horror’s most gifted filmmakers. However, it wasn’t until he inked a deal with Netflix and was allowed to luxuriate in the long-form trappings of The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Midnight Club that he displayed his auteur credentials.
Similar to Tarantino, he’s also got an ever-expanding company of actors he’ll work with over and over again, and he’s at his best when he’s given free rein to stamp his authority on a project. Does that make him the two-time Academy Award winner’s counterpart in horror? It’s not difficult to see why King made that comparison, even if they’re two completely different talents with two completely different sets of artistic, stylistic, and storytelling principles.
It’s a little bit apples-to-oranges, but it’s not the most ridiculous thing to suggest either.
