If you were hoping that Mike Flanagan and company would take you to a new spooky house for a third Haunting season, I have some bad news. According to the filmmaker, who created both The Haunting of Hill House and the recent The Haunting of Bly Manor for Netflix, there are currently no plans for a third entry. Meanwhile, in other Mike Flanagan news, the director’s film adaptation of Stephen King‘s Revival seems to be dead.

The Haunting Season 3

With The Haunting of Hill House, filmmaker Mike Flanagan took the framework of Shirley Jackson’s immortal ghost story and created a scary, emotional, highly-acclaimed season of television. Flanagan and his team kept things going with The Haunting of Bly Manor, which adapted the work of Henry James. The implication seemed to be that now that The Haunting was firmly established as an anthology series, Flanagan might return with a third season focusing on a new haunted location.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Flanagan took to Twitter to reveal that right now, no one has any plans for more Haunting. “At the moment there are no plans for more chapters,” he wrote. “Never say never, of course, but right now we are focused on a full slate of other Intrepid projects for 2021 and beyond. If things change we will absolutely let everyone know.”

I loved Hill House, but I thought Bly Manor was a bit of a disappointment. That said, I was still hoping Flanagan would make at least one more spooky season focused on some new literary-inspired ghost story, but I guess it just isn’t in the cards (even though he does add “Never say never” in his statement). In the meantime, Flanagan and his Intrepid Pictures have a different Netflix horror show on the horizon – Midnight Mass, which just wrapped production.

Revival

I’m a big Stephen King nerd, but I’ll be the first to tell you that the latter half of King’s career has been a bit wishy-washy. But every now and then he’ll churn out something great to remind us why he’s so damn popular. One of those late-period reminders is Revival, King’s highly disturbing 2014 novel that suggests the afterlife is a nightmarish hellscape from which there is no escape. It’s a dark, scary book, and over the summer it was revealed that Mike Flanagan was working on turning it into a film.

Flanagan has a history with King adaptations, having helmed Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, so it made sense to have him take on Revival. When the news of Flanagan’s involvement broke, it stated that he was tackling the script and had an option to direct as well. But now it looks like that’s no longer happening. While appearing on The Company Of The Mad podcast (via Comicbook), Flanagan confirmed he was no longer involved by equating his experience on the project with that of Josh Boone. Boone was attached to direct a Revival movie before Flanagan and had spent some time developing it before Flanagan took over.

“We started emailing because I went on to eBay to buy a limited edition of Revival – a beautiful set of Revival, and Josh was selling it,” Flanagan said. “I bought it, and he emailed me on eBay first when the transaction first started, like, ‘Uhhh, hi.’ ‘Oh my god!’ And so we got to go back and forth about Revival, being a project that Josh was doing first and then I also ended up not doing Revival. So we have that in common; we’ve both been through the wringer on that particular story.”

This is a huge bummer, because if done right, Revival could end up being a genuinely scary movie, and I had faith in Flanagan’s ability to tackle the material. “What I love about it is it’s a return to cosmic horror, which I think is so fun,” Flanagan previously said. “It is relentlessly dark and cynical and I’m enjoying the hell out of that. This is just bleak and mean and I like it for that…This one was a really fun piece of material for me because I get to be like, ‘Oh, you want a dark ending? Okay. Cool. Get ready.'” While the director doesn’t say why his take on Revival is no longer happening, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with that inherent darkness.

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