Mike Flanagan revealed that Oculus was his “rip off” of Stephen King’s 1408, and then served as the basis for The Haunting of Hill House
Genre filmmaker Mike Flanagan has brought feature film adaptations of the Stephen King novels Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep to the screen, and recently wrapped up post-production on a feature adaptation of the King short story The Life of Chuck. His production company Intrepid Pictures is currently developing a TV series adaptation of King’s epic The Dark Tower saga for Amazon’s Prime Video. For a while, he was also set to make a movie based on King’s novel Revival, but that fell apart. But one King story he wanted to bring to the screen and never got the chance to work on was the short story 1408, which served as the basis for a 2007 film that was directed by Mikael Håfström from a screenplay by Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszewski, and starred John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. Flanagan missed out on 1408, but that’s okay because he went on to, as he says, rip it off for his 2013 film Oculus, which he first shot as a short film in 2006.
During a Q&A with Fangoria editor Michael Gingold at Fantasia Fest, Flanagan said (with thanks to IndieWire for the transcription), “I really wanted to do 1408. I couldn’t because who the hell was I, for one thing, and they were making the movie already… But that’s Oculus if you replace the hotel room with a mirror, down to the long history of it. 1408 has this incredible monologue basically about the history of the room. That was terrifying to me. And so the structure of Oculus, the short, is exactly the structure of 1408 the short story. You’re told the history of the object — or of the room in the case of the story — and then a skeptical protagonist is left alone in there. In mine, it was a true believer protagonist trying to prove the point, but I just ripped off 1408. That’s where it came from.“
Directed by Flanagan from a screenplay he wrote with Jeff Howard, the feature version of Oculus has the following synopsis: Haunted by the violent demise of their parents 10 years earlier, adult siblings Kaylie and Tim are now struggling to rebuild their relationship. Kaylie suspects that their antique mirror, known as the Lasser Glass, is behind the tragedy. The seemingly harmless reflections contain a malevolent, supernatural force that infects the mind of anyone who gazes into it. As Kaylie gets closer to the truth, the siblings become caught in the mirror’s evil spell.
The experience of making Oculus turned out to be a great benefit when he was offered the chance to make the TV series The Haunting of Hill House, based on a novel by Shirley Jackson. “The Haunting of Hill House was an interesting case because that was brought to me. I believed that The Haunting of Hill House had been perfectly adapted by Robert Wise in 1963. It is a perfect movie. And I said, ‘Well, the novel as it stands, works for about 90 minutes. So if you’re talking about a TV show, you need to do a radical expansion.’ I just did Oculus. The Haunting of Hill House (the TV series) is Oculus, except instead of two siblings there are five. It’s two timelines braided together, same technique for cutting back and forth between them. It’s all about family trauma and the disagreement about a traumatic event in their childhood while they’re forced to confront that dramatic event in the present. It’s just Oculus, but it’s Oculus for 10 hours.“
What do you think of Flanagan “ripping off” 1408 to come up with Oculus, then using Oculus as the inspiration for his The Haunting of Hill House series? Share your thoughts on these quotes by leaving a comment below.