"Mike Flanagan is no stranger to giving people nightmares, thanks to a filmography that includes The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and Gerald’s Game. (His 2011 feature debut, Absentia, haunts me anytime I see a sidewalk that enters into a tunnel.) With a new Exorcist film on his list of upcoming projects—something he recently told the Hollywood Reporter he views as “an opportunity to make the scariest movie I’ve ever made”—he was asked which movies he personally finds terrifying, and his answer was surprising.

Speaking to THR in the same interview, he gave special props to 2008 New French Extremity entry Martyrs (“There’s a lot of gore, but it’s gore with a point. I generally don’t love splatter”) but saved his highest praise for another movie, also from 2008: “The last one that truly frightened me into getting up off of the couch was an Australian movie, Lake Mungo. It chilled me to the bone…”