Mike Flanagan wants a dinosaur movie that actually scares you. Asked in a Reddit AMA this week which franchise he’d take on after The Exorcist, he put Jurassic Park on his wish list and said he’d “want to go really scary with it. A true dinosaur horror film would be a blast.”
He framed it as a swing at the sequels, not the originals. “I spent a lot of my career thinking I wouldn’t do franchises or sequels, and, whoops,” he said, adding that he loves getting “to play in a world I know and respect and adore, and put my own spin on it.” He said the same thing about Jaws: nobody will top the first one, but there’s “a ton of room for improvement on the sequels.”
The AMA, hosted with Prime Video to promote his Carrie series, had him listing dream subjects, horror ones included: “Aliens, werewolves, sharks, sharks, SHARKS.”
Jurassic Park’s genetic-engineering premise is getting closer to reality, making it ripe for a horror revisit. Colossal Biosciences is working to give living animals traits of extinct species, editing gray wolves for dire-wolf traits and developing its mammoth project using Asian elephants. That work raises a question familiar to the franchise: what exactly are we creating?
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm has compared the genome engineering in Jurassic World Rebirth with his company’s work. Science writer Michael Le Page argues that making an animal resemble an extinct species doesn’t make it that species, and Lamm says dinosaur resurrection remains out of reach because there’s no intact dinosaur DNA to work with. Flanagan didn’t mention Colossal or de-extinction in his answer.
Universal is in fact hunting for a director on the next Jurassic World after Gareth Edwards exited the sequel over creative differences, with J.A. Bayona reported as the frontrunner. Flanagan isn’t in that search on any public record. For now the scary dinosaur movie lives entirely in his answer to a fan.
