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

Filmmaker Mike Flanagan is best known for the way he haunts the screen. But if the 46-year-old 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 will speak at commencement for 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.”

Flanagan 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 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, Flanagan 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.”

Flanagan, who graduated in 2002, will use what he’s learned in his Los Angeles career to inspire the next generation of artists at the College of Fine Arts & Communication’s 10 a.m. commencement ceremony.

The college’s Associate Dean Greg Faller taught Flanagan a handful of times when he was a Towson student. Faller said even then, Flanagan had all the makings of an exceptional, inquisitive filmmaker.

But when it comes to making it in the business, talent isn’t nearly as important as persistence, Flanagan said.

“He was motivated from a very young age and I’m not surprised that he is where he is now,” said Faller, who nominated Flanagan to be this year’s speaker.

Faller said Tuesday he’d seen a draft of the filmmaker’s speech and that Flanagan’s story and focus on drive was going to “resonate incredibly well” with the graduates.

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Flanagan said his speech has turned out to be some of the most difficult writing of his career. But in an interview a week before commencement, Flanagan already knew one theme he wanted to spotlight. It stems from 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.”

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. It ended up taking him six years to graduate, as 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,” Flanagan said, anchored by professors who inspired his early work.

“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 early release screenings of some of his works. And last fall, two Towson students shadowed him on set of “The Life of Chuck,” an adaptation of a Stephen King story that Flanagan hopes will be released later this year.

One of those students is Sidharth Gopinath, an electronic media and film major — just like Flanagan — who is graduating Wednesday. The aspiring filmmaker said the week in Mobile, Alabama, with Flanagan 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 Flanagan 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, Gopinath said.

It’ll be a moment to cherish, as Flanagan said “The Life of Chuck” is his favorite movie he’s ever made.

On Wednesday, the Hollywood filmmaker will be speaking to over 500 graduates who are about to enter a world Flanagan said is much harder than the one he faced. And he plans to be upfront about the fact that he doesn’t feel particularly wise, 20 years past his own graduation.

“Every year since I’ve been there, I’ve been confronted with the fact that I know a lot less than I thought I did. And I have so much to learn. I want them to hear that, that that’s okay,” Flanagan said. “They’re in a beautiful, beautiful place in their life where as hard as things may be, and as frightening as the world might look right now, those possibilities exist for them. Those possibilities are beautiful. They’ll only get narrower as time goes on.”