Mike Flanagan was so scared by Killer Klowns from Outer Space as a kid that he refused its haunted house as an adult. He remembers exactly what made the movie unbearable: a clown using a police officer as a ventriloquist dummy.
Years later, faced with a Halloween Horror Nights maze based on the movie, he initially refused to go inside.
“I am not going in there to be re-traumatized. What do you think I am?” he recalled saying while discussing childhood movie scares with the cast and crew of Carrie.
His wife, Kate Siegel, had an answer. Flanagan recalled her telling him, “I think you’re a 45-year-old man who should go into the haunted house, you’re gonna be fine.”
He went in. That initial refusal gave way to an experience he described as both fun and deeply upsetting.
“So I went, it was awful. It was really upsetting, it was a blast, but I was really, really traumatized by it.”
Flanagan said the movie still felt too frightening to revisit as an adult: “Like, it’s that fucked up for me.”
