{"id":168596,"date":"2025-06-08T21:37:08","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T21:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/168596\/"},"modified":"2025-06-08T21:37:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T21:37:08","slug":"mike-flanagan-closes-sxsw-london-with-life-of-chuck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/168596\/","title":{"rendered":"Mike Flanagan Closes SXSW London With ‘Life of Chuck’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMike Flanagan has brought the curtain down on the inaugural SXSW London<\/a> with the U.K. premiere of his latest feature \u201cThe Life of Chuck<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite the feature being the filmmaker\u2019s first major foray away from horror, in a wide-ranging Q&A before the screening at London\u2019s Barbican Centre Flanagan discussed his work in the genre (and love of it), his ongoing collaborations with Stephen King and even offered some news information about his upcoming \u201cCarrie\u201d TV series.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the ongoing shift in perception towards horror, Flanagan said that the genre \u201ctends to struggle to get credibility,\u201d arguing that for each cycle of breakout titles \u2014\u00a0and even Oscar wins such as \u201cGet Out\u201d \u2014\u00a0\u201ca lot of people outside the genre remain perpetually surprised\u201d by its success. \u201cEvery now and then, when you see Jordan Peele win an Academy Award, everyone talks about how this legitimized the horror genre, and then they forget.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike other genres, Flanagan said horror allowed filmmakers to \u201ctalk about things that otherwise are much harder to talk about in entertainment.\u201d He pointed to \u201cNight of the Living Dead\u201d as an example. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf George Romero wanted to make make a film about racism in America in the 60s, he could have made that film, and it would have spoken to people who were interested in having that conversation. But instead, he made \u2018Night of the Living Dead,\u2019 and people went to be scared of the zombies, and in the last moments, you realize the story he\u2019s been telling, and that story then reaches a much wider audience and has much more impact.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tAdded Flanagan: \u201cI think that\u2019s the beauty of horror. You get to talk about incredible things that, if you were to just do it without the wrapping of the genre, you would radically limit its reach and its impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFlanagan also touched on his upcoming series adaptation of King\u2019s \u201cCarrie,\u201d in the works at Amazon, noting that \u201chorror was really hard to do TV, because horror relies on you completely hijacking the viewer\u2019s senses,\u201d while when people watch TV they\u2019re \u201csurrounded by distractions.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tMuch has already been discussed about the \u201cCarrie\u201d series, Flanagan recently admitting to Variety that King had originally been against the idea, telling him \u201cLeave her alone, she\u2019s been through enough,\u201d but had now given him his blessing. Speaking in London, he revealed that his wife and frequent on-screen collaborate Kate Siegel would be directing an episode of the show, marking her first time directing for TV and her first time directing a project being produced by her husband. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Flanagan\u2019s career has mostly been showered in glory, he opened up about one misfire. Asked if he\u2019d ever directed a horror that was \u201cfun and balls to the wall\u201d and didn\u2019t \u201cemotionally cripple the viewer,\u201d he pointed to 2016\u2019s Blumhouse sequel \u201cOuija: Origin of Evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was really fun,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the funny thing was that it really underperformed compared to \u2018Ouija\u2019 one, so I killed that franchise, which I still have to apologize to Jason Blum for every time I see him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSXSW London was opened June 2 by London mayor Sadiq Khan. Throughout the week, speakers included Idris Elba, Julian Lennon and Nile Rodgers plus the CEOs of Twitch, WPP, OnlyFans and Google Deepmind. <\/p>\n

\n\tVariety\u00a0parent company PMC owns the SXSW franchise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mike Flanagan has brought the curtain down on the inaugural SXSW London with the U.K. premiere of his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,257,24477,67137,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-168596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-london","12":"tag-sxsw-london","13":"tag-the-life-of-chuck","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114649906897245141","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}