Do we like Mike Flanagan?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Clean on harm, no pattern of mistreating anyone turned up, and his casting and storytelling include LGBTQ+ people; the gap is how little we found on charity.
Flanagan is the bloke behind The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and Doctor Sleep, so if you've lost a weekend to a slow-burn ghost story that made you cry, that's probably him. He was raised Catholic and kept returning to faith and fear in his work, most openly in Midnight Mass. He moved from Netflix to Amazon, where he signed on for Carrie as the first project the streamer offered him.
On the harm check, the record comes up empty in a good way. Searches for anything he's said or done against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or science turned up nothing, and his shows have a track record of queer characters. Autostraddle's July piece on Carrie counts openly LGBTQ+ actors in the cast and says its author trusts him with queer stories because of Hill House and Bly Manor.
The company he keeps is fine too. His recent work runs through Stephen King adaptations and Amazon and Blumhouse projects, and nothing flagged there. The one thing close to him that made headlines was Netflix firing an actor from his Usher series in 2022 after an investigation into alleged on-set misconduct. The report we read doesn't have Flanagan saying anything about it, so it's a note on the set, not a mark on him.
The recent stuff is mostly shop talk and fan grumbling. He told a fan on Tumblr in 2025 that his Exorcist film wouldn't make its March 2026 date because Carrie had to come first, and Universal then pulled it from the schedule. When news of a new Mist adaptation annoyed King fans in February, he went online to say it wouldn't be a retread of the Darabont film. That's a creative stoush, not a moral one.
On the good-stuff side, our searches turned up no charity or advocacy we could verify, so I won't pad it. What's there is craft: he's known for horror that's about grief and love rather than cruelty, and he talked at TIFF about wanting Carrie to be a fresh angle on the book rather than a copy. That's thin on the community-service side, which keeps this from a perfect score.
So: would we support him? Yes, comfortably. Nothing harmful in his own words or acts came up, nothing against how he treats people, and a body of work that includes plenty of queer characters. The gaps are real, but they're gaps in what we could find, not red flags.