Oculus: The Proto-Hill House

Mike Flanagan and the seeds of horror greatness

Jan 17, 2025

Mike Flanagan properties are always a comfort watch for me. In fact, in the early post-partum days when I had to be up at all hours of the night to care for my newborn, I watched Midnight Mass basically on a loop.

I wasn’t feeling well yesterday, so I took the day off and curled up under a blanket on the couch and watched me some Flanagan.

Maybe you’re familiar with it: the one with the family who moves into a new house and are besieged by a malevolent, inscrutable paranormal force that wishes to feed on and destroy them. Past and present storylines are interwoven, told simultaneously. It deals with themes of mental illness and familial trauma.

I’m talking about Flanagan’s 2013 movie Oculus, though one could be forgiven if you thought I was talking about his beloved limited series, The Haunting of Hill House. Take out the specifics, names, and proper nouns, and their descriptions are identical. My purpose in writing this post is to discuss those similarities and the potential reasons for them.

Spoilers Ahead

I assume you have seen Oculus and The Haunting of Hill House. Spoilers ahead for Oculus in particular. An in-depth plot summary of Oculus can be found here, and one for Hill House is here.

Oculus and the greater Flanagan canon

Oculus was Flanagan’s second full-length movie, after 2011’s Absentia.1

(If you’d like to hear more about Absentia, check out the first episode from the podcast Flanagan’s Wake, hosted by the same guys who did the Kingslinger podcast. They’re going to cover the rest of Flanagan’s oeuvre, in chronological order, week by week.)

Oculus is the project where Flanagan’s style really solidifies. This is the first time we see the shining eye effect included in almost all of his subsequent projects. (This time the eyes mimic the surface of a mirror.) We also see Kate Siegel for the first time, kicking off Flanagan’s tendency to cast from the same stable of actors for each of his projects.

Thematically, we see a focus on family, especially siblings. This is a big part of Haunting of Hill House to an even larger degree, of course—five siblings instead of two—but familial drama is a part of almost everything he does. Even Absentia focuses on two adult sisters.

We also see a bleak, hopeless ending, common to most of Flanagan’s works, especially his original projects. Even Hill House was initially supposed to have a much darker conclusion, but Flanagan ultimately changed it.

Oculus: the Proto-Hill House

Oculus has more in common with Haunting of Hill House than any other of Flanagan’s projects, though. It’s my belief that sometimes a story, or a type of story, gets under a creator’s skin. This is especially true of a first story, the one that has years and years to ferment inside their mind before they’re able to get it out into the world.

(And Though Absentia released two years before Oculus, the concept for the latter originated much earlier in a short film by the strange title Oculus Chapter 3: The Man With a Plan. You can watch it on Youtube here. It’s solid, especially for a micro-budget found footage film. It shows that Oculus was something he’d been working on for a while.)

Besides the Flanaganisms (yes, I stole that term from Flanagan’s Wake–thanks, guys!) listed above, the two projects share a lot of in-story beats:

Both stories deal with adult siblings wrestling with their childhoods.
A focus on mental health, especially related to unresolved childhood trauma, especially one singular moment of trauma that changed everything in the lives of the siblings.

Much like Hill House, the Lasser Glass, as the mirror in Oculus is named, consumes its victims and incorporates them into itself, trapping them forever, even using them to torment future victims. Both Oculus and Hill House end with the ghost of every victim crowded around the main characters.
Tacking onto that, they both “feed on” and consume their victims. Hill House’s red room is even described as a stomach.

Both stories involve one of the parents being driven mad by a woman who whispers in their ear. Both also end with the father sacrificing himself to save his children.

There is also a similarity in the violent histories of both Hill House and the Lasser Glass, the way the misfortunes and deaths can be traced back through the decades and centuries.

The most striking commonality is the way the stories are structured, edited, and told. In each, two storylines are told simultaneously, the story of the original trauma and everything leading up to it, and the future, when the adult siblings are compelled to try to deal with it.

Switching between a past and present storyline is not a new technique. What is new is how Flanagan visually switches, almost seamlessly, between the adult and child versions of the characters, between the past and the present, sometimes giving the sense that they are occupying the same space. They even sometimes appear to be watching, or even interacting with, the other versions of themselves.

This is something that Flanagan pioneered in Oculus and perfected in episode 6 of Hill House, Two Storms. Two Storms shows the events of two separate storms, but time and even space are blurred, with the characters walking seamlessly back and forth between the present setting of one of the sibling’s funerals, and the past, during a storm at Hill House. This is impressive on a conceptual level, but is even more technically impressive because it was filmed in only five long shots.2

In both Oculus and The Haunting of Hill House, this technique is used to underscore how real memories can feel to us. It’s also a manifestation of a major theme in much of Flanagan’s work: that ghosts are not just supernatural beings. We can be haunted by the past, by regret, by the bad decisions we made or were made on our behalf.

Hill House: Oculus, but done better

( Netflix ), The Haunting Of Hill House | House on haunted hill, House ...

The Haunting of Hill House is an exceptional work of fiction, having won and been nominated for many awards. It’s one of the best series out there, horror or not. Even non-horror fans are drawn to it.

Oculus, on the other hand, does not reach those same heights. Don’t get me wrong–it’s a really good movie. I remember watching it shortly after it released and enjoying it. This was before I was familiar with Flanagan, and indeed before I regarded horror as more than just a casual fan.

It is one of the better paranormal horror movies released around that time, but otherwise it doesn’t distinguish itself much from similar “family moves into haunted house”-type films. It still follows a lot of the tropes of the genre. And though the script hints at a deeper lore, it’s not shown on screen. The parents are as undeveloped as you’d expect horror movie parents to be.3

That contrasts with Hill House, where every character is fully developed. Unlike the father in Oculus–who gives off all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy vibes–Olivia’s descent into madness is both understandable and sympathetic. We are shown exactly how the house manipulates her by taking advantage of her greatest weakness: her desire to protect her children.

(Obviously, a larger budget and a ten-episode run really help in these areas as well.)

It’s interesting that none of Flanagan’s subsequent projects after Hill House retread this same territory. I’m wont to think that he got it out of his system. Or maybe he realized how similar the two projects were and made an effort to change up his stories. Is that why Bly Manor is (supposedly) a romance and not a horror drama?

Who knows? But it sure is interesting.

What I’m Reading

The Spite House by Johnny Compton

I actually also watched Absentia during my illness-induced couch stupor. But that’s a post for another time.

Fun fact: some of the child actors were unable to move out of the way of the camera quickly enough, so crew members would have to scoop them up and carry them out of view of the camera.

Though what I want to know is HOW THE HELL did that Dad afford that mirror? It sold at a swanky auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It used to hang at Balmoral Castle. That’s where the royal family vacations. And somehow it ended up in the home office of a software engineer? I call BS.