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• I have a hunch why Mike Flanagan worked so much Back to the Future into The Life of Chuck

This article contains spoilers for The Life of Chuck.

For the many recognizable tunes that color Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck (based on the novella of the same name by Stephen King), I was shocked that, by the end, I hadn't heard Huey Lewis and the News sing 'The Power of Love.' Why? Because for a good 15 minutes at least of the last act, The Life of Chuck takes place pretty firmly in Back to the Future.

The scene I'm talking about takes place in the early years of Charles 'Chuck' Krantz, played in this moment by Benjamin Pajak. The movie's backwards-linear story, which has already tackled a couple of dance numbers, is in some way all leading up to this moment, when young Chuck dances with an older, equally talented girl at a school dance of bygone years. And though the sequence takes place in Chuck's middle school gym, it has all the trappings of a Hill Valley High School soiree from 1955.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays two characters in the film (sorta, it's complicated), appears at the dance dressed in the robin egg blues of the musicians that back Marty for his famous rendition of Johnny B. Goode. The boyfriend of Chuck's older dance partner is dressed in an unmistakable orange vest and Levis, and on stage, a large mural of what is clearly a DeLorean ramping up to 88 MPH is in the center of streamer-covered backdrop.

So as I left the theater after watching the already-lauded film, I had two questions on my mind - first, how long will I continue crying until my body simply runs out of moisture, and second, why did Mike Flanagan put so much Back to the Future into The Life of Chuck?

Well, I've thought about that for a while, and though I don't make the claim to completely know the mind of two of some of the greatest minds of horror entertainment, I think I've at least come up with a passable theory.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

Though The Life of Chuck is very much not horror fare, part of its plot does rely on portents of doom. The house that Chuck grows up in (his grandparents' - Chuck loses his parents at a young age) is uniquely haunted. Behind a locked door on the top floor is a room that shows its entrant visions of deaths that haven't happened yet. Chuck will only go into this creepy cupola once, but his grandfather (played brilliantly by Mark Hamill) has been in a handful of times, and during one booze-filled evening, he recounts to his grandson what's really in the mysterious room.

The way that Chuck's grandpa describes it is by asking the boy if he believes if A Christmas Carol is really 'a ghost story,' offering the idea that Scrooge's future visions are just as much 'ghosts' as a typical spirit's vision of the lost past. As Chuck will come to learn, the unassuming extra room upstairs is a source of real horror in his grandfather's life, showing him visions of the deaths of his neighbors, his wife, and even at one point, himself.

But here's my theory - I think that it isn't just the cupola that's haunted by the future, I think it's every moment of the titular life of Chuck that we see in the film. And I further think that, to really drive that idea home in the penultimate scene, Mike Flanagan relied on a place that most culturally aware viewers already know is haunted by a "future ghost" - Hill Valley High School.

"It was a wonder I was even born"

Marty McFly is certainly not presented as a ghost in the Back to the Future films, although if you squint hard enough, you can at least see the correlations. He speaks in riddles to the 1950s cast members around him, he knows their fates like the back of his hand (poor jail-bound Uncle Joey), and at one point in the movie, he even starts to become translucent, fading into so much ether like Hamlet's father. But what's more important than his actual "ghost" status is that his presence in the past has the same effect as any good spirit would, proving the maxim at the heart of any haunted tale: Where a ghost is anchored, time is unmoored. 

The Life of Chuck is a movie about the future that is death haunting the past that is life. For Chuck's grandfather, and for so many real-world viewers, that haunting is too much. What is the point of living, they are tempted to ask, if we're all going to end up a vision in the cupola one day anyway?

But at the climax of the film, Chuck gets his own look into the accursed room, and he makes a decision that retroactively explains the smiling, dancing adult played by Tom Hiddleston we meet in the middle of the movie. Even though Chuck sees his death on a hospital bed, and even though we the viewers know it is from a brain tumor at the age of 39, Chuck decides that the rest of his story is more important. That all his future dances are worth the curtain call he knows is coming.

When Marty McFly first travels back to 1955, he meets the man that will become his father, George McFly, and finds him completely inept. Inept to the point that Marty is convinced that the man can't get with his mom by himself, and that he must take it into his own hands to assure his own birth. There's a line that Marty utters, around the beginning of the second act, that perfectly encapsulates his frustration.

"Jesus, George," he says under his breath, "It was a wonder I was even born."

But that's the thing - it is a wonder, Marty. It's a wonder for any of us.

The Life of Chuck is in theaters now. 

Plunge the catacombs of the creepy with Popverse's Mike Flanagan watch order, and watch our hour-long conversation with Flanagan and actor/co-writer Kate Siegel.