Mike Flanagan has developed into a writer-director at the forefront of contemporary horror, both in television and film. His work displays a horror auteurism that sets him apart from his contemporaries, with one particular stylistic marker rising above: Flanagan’s devotion to negative space. Negative space is everything around the main subject in an image. Positive space accounts for the subject of the image, that which we are drawn to focus on. Flanagan’s process suggests a careful deployment of negative space to build tension towards a terrifying payoff. Through an examination of two scenes from Flanagan’s oeuvre, one from the limited series The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and the other from the film Doctor Sleep (2019), I intend to lay out how Flanagan’s use of negative space defines his approach to filming horror.
The Haunting of Hill House
The Haunting of Hill House relays the Crain family’s tragic haunting at Hill House, and Flanagan wastes no time establishing his style in the pilot. The episode, entitled “Steven Sees a Ghost,” begins with a voiceover while Flanagan’s camera lingers on the outside of the eponymous haunted house. While Steven Crain’s (Michiel Huisman) narration sets up the plot, we are treated to shots of the empty home–hallways, stairwells, entryways, all silent and still. Each image is dominated by negative space without a proper positive subject. When we meet our first subject, it is the sleeping young Steven (Paxton Singleton), awoken by the sound of the screams of his sister Nellie (Violet McGraw).
Steven walks down the hallway and enters Nell’s bedroom, which she shares with her twin brother Luke (Julian Hilliard). When Steven enters the room, Flanagan treats us to this shot:
It is dominated by negative space. The positive portions of this shot are Steven, Nell, and Luke, but the majority of it is the expansive bedroom fleshed out by deep focus. Nell is flanked by shadow, and there is just enough light to see our characters, but not to feel as though we can see the whole room, causing the sense of unease that darkness produces. Shortly thereafter, Nell tells Steven she was scared of the “Bent-Neck Lady,” and then they are joined by their father Hugh (Henry Thomas). Between these moments, Flanagan doles out a series of medium and close-up shots but then doubles the above shot as Hugh sits down on the bed with Nellie. This accomplishes a reiteration of the negative space around the characters.
In a story that tells us upfront that someone sees a ghost, the negative space operates as a blank slate we expect to be filled, trained by previous ghost stories that rely on jump scares, when something pops suddenly out of the background, to shock us. Flanagan plays on expectations to build tension through multiple shots of negative space without anything to fill it. Everyone returns to their rooms, accompanied by similar deep focus, long shots of the empty hallway. The opening scene ends with this medium-close-up of the sleeping Nellie, and the appearance of the “Bent-Neck Lady.”
Because Flanagan has already made a show of displaying the area behind Nellie as darkened but empty negative space, the slow reveal of the “Bent-Neck Lady” sliding out, filling the negative space, pays off the tension built by Flanagan’s previous shots. He does not rush to show us a ghost immediately, choosing to allow viewers’ imaginations to fill the space with ghouls until he does so himself, setting the standard that a swathe of negative space that seems safe at first is likely to be filled by a creature of the night.
Doctor Sleep
Even though he is following Stanley Kubrick, Flanagan manages to personalize the Stephen King universe through utilizing negative space in Doctor Sleep. Following a now-adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor), Flanagan’s film grapples with the aftermath of a traumatic haunting, much like The Haunting of Hill House. Flanagan once again has the chance to build anticipation from an audience that is primed to expect thrills, and we see this as he builds tension towards the “redrum” reveal in Danny’s apartment.
Danny’s room is high-ceilinged, with little in the way of furniture, and an empty, black wall across from the bed. Each time Danny enters it, Flanagan frames him as small, dwarfed by the deep focus and towering walls of the room. The black wall is the epitome of negative space: an area devoid of any defining features other than blankness. Flanagan repeatedly frames Danny against it, lingering on how he watches it, compelling us to do the same. Over time, the wall becomes the same as the empty bedroom space, an area we are primed to wonder about. Only once Danny has settled in and believes he has outrun his past, at a narrative point where both he and the audience has been lulled into the hope of an easier path, the crashing sound caused by the word “redrum” appearing in cracked letters on the wall drags him from sleep:
While less of an immediate shock than the “Bent-Neck Lady” in Hill House, Flanagan utilizes the same tension-building technique here, drawing our attention to a dark space, the repetition suggesting it is not as innocuous as it seems. The payoff of harkening to an iconic moment from The Shining (1980) is that Flanagan does not rely on a jump scare of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) leaping out, or a bloodied face diving onto Danny. Flanagan understands that terror comes from the confirmation of apprehension, and turning the negative space of the blank wall into the locus of Danny’s haunted past is an expansion of the Hill House approach. Flanagan’s brand of horror reaches arguably more intense terror because he lingers in the lead-up, spending as much time building disquiet as revealing the actual monsters hiding in the shadows.
These two scenes are but a sampling of Flanagan’s wide-ranging use of negative space in his film and television projects. Nonetheless, they capture the essence of a director that relies on the steady suggestion of impending doom to craft terror, tapping into the psychological response that comes from wondering when the promise of horror transforms into that payoff. To quote the likely apocryphal but instructive Alfred Hitchcock quote, “the terror is not in the bang, but the anticipation of it.”
The Haunting of Hill House is streaming on Netflix – and you can find Doctor Sleep on Amazon (ad):
Devin McGrath-Conwell is a graduate of Middlebury College currently working on a Screenwriting MFA at Emerson College. His work has also appeared on portlandfilmreview.com where he is a staff writer, cbsnews.com, and in The Middlebury Campus. He has been lucky enough to have his screenwriting produced in the short film Locally Sourced, which he also directed, and the web series Lambert Hall. If you enjoy his work, follow him on Twitter @devintwonames where he regularly tweets into the abyss about film, television, and, of course, horror.
