Mike Flanagan explains what it would take to make 'The Haunting' Season 3 happen

The Haunting of Hill House arrived on Netflix in 2018, and launched what's now a robust output of horror series at the streamer from writer/director Mike Flanagan. Flanagan's fourth Netflix show, The Midnight Club, arrived just last week, and his fifth, The Fall of the House of Usher, is coming soon. But some Hill House fans, and fans of its follow-up series The Haunting of Bly Manor, are still left wondering: With all these new shows, is there still room for a potential third season in The Haunting anthology?

Speaking to TVLine on the press tour for The Midnight Club, which adapts the work of young adult horror icon Christopher Pike, Flanagan explained the thought process behind what makes a new season of The Haunting, an anthology series which has previously adapted the works of Shirley Jackson and Henry James. House of Usher, Flanagan's next series, is yet another adaptation, this time remixing the works of Edgar Allan Poe, so why isn't it The Haunting of the House of Usher? Here's how Flanagan put it:

“Our thing with the Haunting is that we always wanted it to be primarily based on a piece of classic horror literature, and ideally something that has been adapted before that we can do something different with,” he said. “When we think of the Haunting, we think about authors like [Edgar Allan] Poe and [Charles] Dickens, contemporaries that are more in the Henry James, Shirley Jackson world. The other criteria with it is that it has to primarily be about ghosts. That question came up with The Fall of the House of Usher because that was based on Poe. It’s just not a ghost story, and so, there’s no haunting there. [The Midnight Club] was always its own thing.”

Though the series is set to also adapt other Poe stories as part of its overall narrative, the original story The Fall of the House of Usher is a work of Gothic fiction rooted more in paranoia and potentially supernatural forces beyond the realm of ghosts, as is the case with many of Poe's best-known stories. So, the simple exclusion of ghosts means Usher stands alone, but that doesn't mean The Haunting series is done forever. In fact, it's something Flanagan and his producing partner Trevor Macy consider frequently. 

“What makes the Haunting the Haunting, and if and how we could re-approach it is something we talk about pretty frequently because we’ve always left that door open,” Flanagan said. “[But] we don’t want to do it just to do it.”

There are, of course, plenty of classic ghost stories that might make good fodder for a third season of the series. For now, though, we still have The Fall of the House of Usher to look forward to.

Looking for some spooky thrills? Check out Season 1 of SYFY's haunted house saga SurrealEstate on the SYFY app, and get ready for Season 2 on the way later this year.