Mike Flanagan on Adapting Stephen King’s “The Life of Chuck”: ‘This Might Be the Best Movie I Ever Get to Make’

When you hear “Mike Flanagan” and “Stephen King adaptation” in the same breath, you probably imagine a haunted house, a creeping sense of dread, or a ghost lurking behind a closed door. But with The Life of Chuck, Flanagan steps away from horror to tell one of the most personal and existentially rich coming of age stories of his career about a man called Charles Krantz.

Adapted from a novella in King’s 2020 novella collection If It Bleeds, The Life of Chuck follows a man’s life in reverse, from death to childhood, examining the joy found in everyday moments. After all, a life lived is best understood backwards.

It’s less about terror and more about time, memory, joy—and how the universe inside us may be the most important one of all. “It was a story about defining and capturing and creating joy.”

“This might be the best movie I ever get to make,” Flanagan recalls after he emailed King  after reading his story for the first time.

A Pandemic-Read That Upended Flanagan’s World

Flanagan first encountered The Life of Chuck during April 2020, deep in the uncertainty of the COVID-19 lockdowns. “It immediately felt like it was for me—so much so that it was uncomfortable,” he says. The story’s depiction of a man watching his world fall apart mirrors the collective anxiety of the moment. “I felt like the world was ending, too.”

By the end of his read, he was crying—tears not of grief, but of joy. “It lifted me up,” he shares. “I felt optimistic and hopeful, and I looked back on my life a little differently.”

Flanagan pursued King for the rights to The Life Of Chuck, but King initially turned him down. Flanagan had just been given the greenlight for The Dark Tower and King didn’t want one project stalling another. But he persisted. The story wouldn’t leave him. He told King that he “desperately wanted to make this.”

Young Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) & Mike Flanagan. Photo courtesy of NEON.

When The Dark Tower fortuitously hit several major development delays, he returned to King with an adaptation request. He agreed with trepidation: “Are you sure? That’s a strange one.”

A Stephen King Story Without the Horror

At first glance, The Life of Chuck has some ingredients for horror: a mysterious attic no one dares to enter, and a slow unraveling of reality. But Flanagan wasn’t interested in making another supernatural thriller. “Stay out of the attic—it’s full of ghosts,” he jokes. “That’s a horror tagline if I’ve ever heard one.” But to him, what haunts the attic isn’t spirits—it’s inevitable mortality.

“The attic, or the cupola, represents the unknowable,” Flanagan states. “It tells you how and when you’ll die. That’s a terrifying idea, but also profoundly human. It’s not about ghosts. It’s about our desire to know the end of our story.”

By leaning into that existential fear of death—the one we all carry—Flanagan finds emotional weight far beyond horror genre tropes. “This is a story about joy,” he declares. “The threat isn’t death. The threat is forgetting what made life beautiful.” And therein lies its beauty. “The story is kaleidoscopic.”

[More: Mike Flanagan On ‘The Haunting Of Hill House’]

Filling in the Gaps—Without Changing the Heart

King’s novella is structurally unique, told in reverse across three acts: Chuck’s death, his midlife, and then his childhood. Flanagan sticks closely to the source, confirming, “There weren’t many gaps in the story. I took almost everything off the page.”

Instead of inventing plot points, he added emotional and visual threads—subtle details that tie Chuck’s world together. A boombox in a hospital turns out to be the same one used in his childhood dance class. The car driven in the opening scenes belongs to Chuck’s grandfather. Even a cordless landline phone is seen across timelines.

“If I did it right, people wouldn’t notice on the first watch,” Flanagan says. “But those details tell you this whole universe lives inside of Chuck.”

To build on King’s themes, Flanagan incorporates references like Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar. “Sagan helped articulate the contradiction King was already playing with—that our lives are cosmically tiny and completely enormous at the same time.”

Anchored in Joy, Not Fear

Existential stories often spiral into abstraction, but Flanagan keeps one word at the center of the entire film: joy. “You can’t talk about joy without mortality,” he says. “They’re linked. You have to know you’re going to lose something to truly appreciate it.”

Each act in the film expresses a different angle on joy—acceptance, creativity, nostalgia—but it’s the final section, Chuck’s childhood, that hits the deepest. “That’s the moment,” Flanagan adds, “when the stars are burning out, and you hear a song playing in the wind. It’s the song from his childhood dance class—the thing that made him happiest. That’s what he remembers.”

In a genre known for scares, The Life of Chuck packs a mighty wallop in quiet resilience. We all know how this life ends. We all leave the world the same way one day. What matters is how we live it.

Writing Lessons from Mike Flanagan

There’s a lot to learn from Flanagan’s approach to screenwriting:

1. Use genre as a delivery system, not a limitation
Just because a story starts with horror elements, it doesn’t mean it has to end there. Flanagan uses genre to explore emotion, not box it in.

2. Adaptation is about interpretation
Rather than expanding the plot, Flanagan explores and amplifies its core emotional truth. Great adaptation sometimes means restraint and focusing on small tender moments.

3. Think in emotional symbols
Small details—a car, a boombox, a song—can build and enrich an entire universe. Visual metaphors carry emotional weight when you don’t have room for exposition.

4. Theme drives structure
Reverse storytelling works here because it reveals character, not just chronology. Start with the emotional arc, then design structure to support it to make it more meaningful.

5. Chase stories that scare you emotionally
Flanagan nearly stopped reading King’s novella because the story hit so close to home. The lockdown discomfort became the source of his most powerful work.

by Staff Writer

From our in-house editorial team.