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EMPIRE IS SHOCKED. Mike Flanagan, director of Doctor Sleep and creator of three of TV’s scariest mini-series (The Haunting Of Hill House, The Haunting Of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass), has just admitted he couldn’t handle horror until well into his teens. “I would fake being sick at sleepovers if they were going to watch a horror movie,” he says. “I could only watch scary stuff through my fingers.”
Instead, he came into the genre through books, whose frights he figured (incorrectly, it turned out) would be easier to manage. And the writer who made the biggest impact on the adolescent Flanagan was Young Adult thrill-maestro Christopher Pike. “His work was hugely formative for me,” Flanagan says. “He wrote some pretty advanced stuff for his young readers, and it was not at all uncommon for his teenage characters to die, pretty shockingly. His books were full of things I found really exciting and thrilling and dark. So I became a bit of an addict.”
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Heather Langenkamp as Dr Stanton;