When do you begin pre-production on your next movie? Have you already written it?

Not exactly sure what's next - we just finished post production on THE LIFE OF CHUCK so we're focused on getting that into the world. There are several other irons in the fire, both in film and TV, but nothing I can announce yet.

As one who follows your letterboxd and is a Vermonter, I simply must know: Thoughts on Time Chasers? Have you seen much else by our wacky native son, David Giancola?

I discovered Time Chasers through Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is one of my all-time favorite things on planet Earth. So naturally, I found the movie to be absolutely, positively delightful. "I hope they end up together... at the bottom of a well torn apart by animals"

Hi Mike! I hope you're having a great day. I was just wondering if you could tell us where Midnight Mass is set? I know Crockett Island is based on the real-life Tangier Island which is in Virginia. In Book I, Riley gets a letter from Annie that says Washington, but I always imagined Crockett to be off the coast of Maine (or the East Coast in general.)

We were intentionally vague about where the fictional island itself was located. It was written to be in the Chesapeake in the early drafts of the novel, and because we filmed in Vancouver I had considered making it clear that it was in the Pacific Northwest, but by the time we were actually making the show I thought it was stronger to let it be less specific. It made the parable feel a little more potent, and the story a little more universal.

Hi Mike! A dear friend and I compiled our dream celebrity D&D party and you're the only person we included who we aren't actually sure plays D&D. Do/have you? If not, do you think you'd give it a go? My mate and I maintain you'd be an excellent DM.

P.S. Thank you for every time you've reduced me to tears, scared me to death and/or made me laugh my head off. All three happen a lot.

My big regret is that I didn't discover DnD until I was an adult. I think it would have greatly enhanced and improved my formative years. Now that I have discovered it, I absolutely adore it and am making sure my kids have every opportunity to play (they love it too), so yes please include me.

Hey Mike! I’ve been working on watching all your movies and I can’t seem to find your earlier works like Ghosts or Hamilton Streets, Makebelieve and Still Life. Do you know where we can find them?

I do, and if I have my way, you will never find them... those are student films and aren't fit for public consumption. Some of my closest collaborators have never seen those, and never will. ;)

hi mike! I love your work so dearly. OI'm currently writing my undergraduate thesis on the way time is treated in lake mungo and your version of hill house, and I'm having a grand ol' time! for some reason, I had a memory of you saying that Lake Mungo and Don't Look Now both served as inspiration for the Bent-Neck Lady, but I can't find that aaaaaanywhere. any thoughts on why I thought that?

It's certainly true, and I've said it in interviews and Q&A's over the years - not sure where you can find it in print, but both Lake Mungo and Don't Look Now are absolutely inspirations for the Bent-Neck Lady. Both deal beautifully with the idea of a protagonist being haunted by a premonition, and there are other great examples as well, including an episode of the original Twilight Zone series called "Spur of the Moment", which puts an interesting twist on the concept.

hello! longtime fan and fellow massachusettsan here! something that has plagued me for years is the choice for methuen to be the setting for hill house - of all the towns in MA, what made you settle on methuen? were you trying to avoid any overtly spooky history (danvers, ipswich, andover, peabody, or any of the Old Salem area)? was it more of an aim for just an unassuming real place? i'm deeply curious!

I have family in Methuen, and spent a fair amount of time there as a kid. My father was born and raised in Gloucester, and I was born in Salem, but most of my childhood visits were to my aunts and uncles in Methuen, so that felt like a good idea for this one. I didn't want to do anything that had a spooky lore to it (Salem would have eclipsed the whole show), and this felt like a good fit.

On the Netflix "Masters of Horror" interview you and Guillermo del Toro did together, there seemed to be some reference to an off-camera discussion about a Bleak House project? Was that something you played with collaborating on?

Not a project - Guillermo has a house he calls "Bleak House" that is filled with his favorite artifacts, books, props, and memorabilia (in fact, he has more than one Bleak House now). He invited to come over and check it out. And it was pretty astonishing...

Hi Mike! I love your work. The Haunting of Hill House is a favorite of mine. I am very interested in the history of the house and the ghosts (unnamed ghosts as well). I read somewhere that at the time the show was filming, you were working on a history of Hill House type of story. I wanted to know if that was true.

This is true. The cold open of several episodes, starting with episode 2, were going to be devoted to the history of the house, and set up a lot of context about the individual ghosts we'd meet. We had gone as far as to start casting the roles and figuring out how to build various versions of the set to show the house itself under construction, but we had a lot of budgetary issues on that show and were forced to cut the history sections entirely. I really dug these sections, and I think they would have been very cool.

UPDATED: Here are all of those script pages, from episodes 2, 4, and 7 respectively. Hope you enjoy.

hi mike!

i hope this reaches you well! i just watched hill house for the first time (absolutely stunning, the themes of grief resonated heavily with me) and have been hyping myself up to cry over bly manor again.

i was wondering if there’s any hope for another haunting series? bly manor and hill house are some of my favorite shows ever, and i would love to see more in that sort of genre.

(p.s. hush is what got me into horror, i just recently found out it came from YOU, so thank you for igniting a passion for me)

Hi! I'm afraid there really doesn't seem to be a path for any more Haunting series, at least with my involvement - I'm no longer at Netflix, and I'm deep into new projects that I'm incredibly excited about, and are monopolizing my availability for years.

I'll always be grateful to The Haunting - it started my career in television - but I think that chapter of my life is closed. That doesn't mean there won't ever be more - Netflix, Amblin and Paramount own the rights and could exploit them whenever they want for new adaptations, but I imagine it's highly unlikely that I'd be involved. Never say never, I suppose!

Hey Mike, I'm an absolutely massive fan of all your work!! I'm curious, which of your films are you lost proud of...? Same question for all your series as well. Ironically I can't decide because they're all so spectacular but I was wondering which ones are your personal favourites :D

It's a very tough question, but at the moment, my favorite series is Midnight Mass, and my favorite movie is The Life of Chuck.

Hey, Mike! I've been rewatching Shudder's "101 Scariest Movie Moments" and I love how passionately and thoughtfully you (and Kate!) talk about the movies that shaped you. It has me wondering if you've seen Late Night With The Devil yet — because it was one of the best horror movies I've ever seen and I would kill to get your thoughts on it.

Absolute adore that movie! You can see my thoughts over at my Letterboxd account

That's cool, I don't even really eat dinner anyway so (cries softly)

was Crockett island named after Mr Crockett from Salems Lot ?

It was not! I drew a lot of inspiration from the real-life island community of Tangier, Virginia. Tangier is a very isolated community out there in the grey waters of the Chesapeake, and it's so contained that linguists study the community because it has a dialect that only exists there. The most common surname on the island is Crockett, named for the first permanent settler John Crockett. Another very common surname there is Pruitt. I took names from Tangier's history as well, including Charles Scarborough, a landowner who held the patent for the island in the late 1600's (Leeza, Wade and Dolly adopted his name). Tangier's mayor is James "Ooker" Eskridge. Tangier is accessible only by ferry or small plane (only during daylight hours). There are two boats, and one of them is called the "Chesapeake Breeze" (we named ours "The Breeze" and "The Bell"), and we almost incorporated the small landing strip for a Cessna in the show but it posed too many story problems later. Tangier has an uninhabited northern portion of the island that is actually called the Uppards, and it is indeed populated by stray cats. The story Warren tells about dead bodies poking up in people's yards on Crockett is also a true phenomenon that occurs on Tangier. The school, the general store, the fact that there are no hotels on the island, and even the church were all inspired by the very real circumstances on Tangier. I was so taken with this real life community that for a long time I wanted to shoot the actual series there, but it wasn't feasible.

hai mike ^^ just saw absentia last night. really really solid!!! i loved it all so much & its so impressive for a budget of just $70k. and god the scares are so amazing too. i wonder how that filmmaking process went and how you managed to get it made in the first place?

I was about to write a long post about this, but it occurred to me that this is a great chance to share this little retrospective documentary I put together many years ago about making Absentia, and I actually found a link to it on YouTube! Hope you enjoy!

Hi Mike, I hope it is alright to ask you all those questions about Dark Tower? Yeah I get it why only some are answered, it's probably too early. I hope we do not bother you with asking about it?

Hi there, I really can't talk about The Dark Tower, and won't be able to for a long time. Sorry to say I can't answer any Tower questions, it doesn't bother me to be asked per se but I just have to delete them because I truly can't say anything. Hope you understand!

hi mike! since finishing bly "i shall believe" by sheryl crow has been on heavy rotation in my music and it always brings me right back to seeing that breathtaking closing frame for the first time. i was wondering if you could share any reasoning, if any, there was for that being the closing music for the show? thanks!

I first heard "I Shall Believe" in a movie called The Pallbearer in 1996. I became low-key obsessed with the song that whole year. It was a song that hid fathoms under its deceptive simplicity, and it always cast a mournful, romantic spell on me. For a long time, I knew I wanted to use it in something, but didn't have the right kind of story - I needed a story that ached a certain way. I started thinking of it for Bly while I was writing the pilot. We didn't have much of a budget for needle drops, so I was initially encouraged to leave my options open. With Hill House I'd insisted on using "Heavenly Day" and "If I Go I'm Goin'" before the scripts for those episodes were even finished, but in this case the producers wanted to wait and see how the show developed. Bly was a love story, and a love story walks a razor's edge when it comes to tone. The first cut of the finale used a different song, something much more generic, and I knew it was going in the wrong direction. I put "I Shall Believe" in, and recut the sequence to the structure of the song, and suddenly everything worked. I told them that we absolutely had to that song, and everyone agreed when they saw the cut.

I love that song.