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.
