For Towson commencement, filmmaker and alum Mike Flanagan shares message of persistence and hope

Filmmaker Mike Flanagan is best known for the way he haunts the screen. But if the writer and director could tell his younger self that his success would come from horror movies, it would be frightening news.

“As a kid, I was actually terrified of horror. I avoided it,” said Flanagan, who gave the commencement speech at his alma mater Towson University on Wednesday. “If my friends were watching a scary movie, I would pretend to be sick so I could go home from their house.”

In an interview prior to commencement, the director said he turned to books, including works by Edgar Allan Poe “when I was way too young to be reading Poe,” as an easier way to explore his greatest fears. That backfired, as “it’s much scarier in your imagination than it is on the screen,” Flanagan said.

But in the years since he watched horror movies through his fingers, the filmmaker’s imagination has yielded acclaimed and disturbing family TV drama adaptations like “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” and horror flicks like “Oculus” and “Hush,” which stars his wife, Kate Siegel.

Flanagan fell in love with horror at Towson, where the self-proclaimed Maryland kid — born in Salem, Massachusetts, he grew up in Bowie, where his parents still live — produced his first three feature films and his first horror movie, a student film called “College Gothic.”

The 2002 Towson grad used what he’s learned in his Los Angeles career to inspire the next generation of artists at the College of Fine Arts & Communication’s commencement ceremony.

Speaking to over 500 graduates, Flanagan said that he was no longer the person he was when he donned his Tiger black and gold — and they wouldn’t be either.

“You will be someone who grows out of this person,” Flanagan said. “And that’s good. That’s right. That’s life.”

The college’s Associate Dean Greg Faller, who taught Flanagan a handful of times when he was a Towson student, nominated the filmmaker to be this year’s speaker.

“He was motivated from a very young age and I’m not surprised that he is where he is now,” said Faller, who noted that even as a student Flanagan had all the makings of an exceptional, inquisitive filmmaker.

The director told The Baltimore Sun his speech turned out to be some of the most difficult writing of his career. One theme he wanted to spotlight, he said, relates to the way he approaches his shows and movies: not as horror stories, but as “something that’s beautiful and true and accessible and that encourages people not only to be a little braver for enduring the experience but leaves them on a note of hope.”

“Horror only matters if there’s hope,” Flanagan said. “Otherwise, it’s not horror, it’s despair.”

During his 20-minute speech, Flanagan compared life to confetti: “messy, shapeless, chaotic; it is falling all around us.” He said the graduates inspired him, especially as many in the class of 2024 graduated high school during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which the 46-year-old had barely been able to cope with himself.

“What I want to say is, ‘I’m sorry. Please fix this. Save us. Do better than we did,'” Flanagan said to laughter. “And how radically unfair of an ask that is.”

Kate Sellers, one of over 50 graduate students who crossed the stage Wednesday, said she appreciated Flanagan’s honesty when it came to “how messed up the world is.” The speech was inspirational but realistic, Sellers added.

As a horror movie fan, Sellers was excited to hear from the Hollywood director, who she said is a well-known name who’s still a lot like the other Maryland kids who flock to Towson.

“As somebody’s who’s kind of like in the middle of their career, I really appreciate how he talked about it’s okay to be unsure what’s happening in the future,” Sellers said. “It was really cool to see what he did. Even if he took six years and he was unsure of himself, he still was able to make such a big name for himself.”

Originally a secondary education major with dreams of being a high school history teacher, an intro to film class is all it took to bring Flanagan into his career. He ended up on the “six year plan” partly because he took time off to film movies on the Towson campus, using university-provided equipment and casting other students out of the theater department.

Eventually, “the whole campus became my classroom,” anchored by professors who inspired his early work, the director told The Baltimore Sun.

“It’s really become important to me to try to make that kind of impact in someone else’s life,” Flanagan said. “I have a slightly privileged position in that I can speak directly about the state of the film and television industry as it is today, from kind of inside of it.

“And I think if there’s a chance for that to be helpful to students who are considering breaking into the industry, I want to be able to provide that for them if I can.”

Flanagan has sought to do that work before: He’s gone back to Towson to speak with classes and host screenings of some of his works. Last fall, two Towson students shadowed him on set of “The Life of Chuck,” an adaptation of a Stephen King story that the filmmaker hopes will be released later this year. Flanagan said it’s his favorite movie he’s ever made.

One of those students is Sidharth Gopinath, an electronic media and film major — just like Flanagan — who graduated Wednesday. The aspiring filmmaker said the week in Mobile, Alabama wasn’t nearly as intimidating as one might expect. It felt like being on a student film set with a Hollywood banner, Gopinath said.

“The moment arrived, I finally got to meet Mr. Mike Flanagan, and it was like, ‘Oh, wow. This is not crazy at all. Like this is totally happening,’” Gopinath said. “After that moment … I wasn’t too nervous. Everyone was so nice.”

Gopinath said the director was an open book while on set, even giving him access to the film’s script and casting him and the other student as extras in a dance scene.

On Wednesday, Flanagan stressed to graduates that he couldn’t promise wisdom. But he did have some pieces of advice: try not to be greedy, despair or lie; stand up for the marginalized; protest injustice when you have to; apologize and grant forgiveness quickly. He told graduates to make peace with the fact that life is a series of collisions and retreats and that the road is always narrowing.

But, the acclaimed director added, be persistent: It took him double the five years he allotted himself to make it in L.A., to even gain a foothold in the industry he now commands.

“The only difference between who you are and who you want to be is what you do,” Flanagan said. “I hope that you take those dreams of yours and that you chase them, even if they seem impossible, and I hope you achieve them.”