Horror is my favourite genre for a lot of reasons but primarily because it’s extremely difficult to get right. It’s easy to make something a horror, just throw a scary monster or a ghost into a story and boom, horror. Even better if you add a few cheap scares in there for the sake of shock value. But good horror, horror that chills your bones and eats away at you in the back of your mind whilst you go about your daily life takes the stars aligning to do right. For as many hits as he has had misses, Stephen King is the undisputed king of horror (excuse the pun). Which is why it surprised me when I discovered that he did not create The Haunting of Hill House, because it felt so Stephen King in structure that I simply expected it to be a classic of his I simply had overlooked. But Hill House keeps on surprising and Netflix’s series dates back all the way to the 1950’s, long before King was a household name.
For over twenty years the Crain family has been haunted by the memories of Hill House and its ghostly inhabitants. Though only children when they lived there for one summer, Steven (Michiel Huisman), Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser), Theo (Kate Seigel), Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and Nell (Victoria Pedretti) live their adult lives in constant fear of what they witnessed in that house, and what it did to their family. But when Nell is discovered to have hanged herself at Hill House, the fractured family must reunite and confront not only the demons of Hill House, but the ones that reside inside themselves if they ever hope to move on.
For over twenty years the Crain family has been haunted by the memories of Hill House and its ghostly inhabitants. Though only children when they lived there for one summer, Steven (Michiel Huisman), Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser), Theo (Kate Seigel), Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and Nell (Victoria Pedretti) live their adult lives in constant fear of what they witnessed in that house, and what it did to their family. But when Nell is discovered to have hanged herself at Hill House, the fractured family must reunite and confront not only the demons of Hill House, but the ones that reside inside themselves if they ever hope to move on.
A lot of good horror is hard to sustain for a ninety-minute film, let alone a nine-hour TV series. But much like the eponymous abode, The Haunting of Hill House latches itself onto you and presents its story in such an interesting way that allows you to not only experience the tale from each Crain sibling’s perspective, but also experience what scares them the most. That’s the secret to Hill House’s success, variety.
The first five episodes all take place in the day leading up to Nell’s death, with her suicide acting as each episode's finale. It’s told through the perspective of each of the five Crain siblings, going from eldest to youngest. The more episodes we see the more we begin to understand what happened at Hill House, and how it has permanently damaged each member of the family.
Each of the siblings has something you’ll love and hate about them, which is exactly what you need in a show like this. You like them enough to not want anything bad to happen to them, but they’ll piss you off enough that you sometimes find yourself wishing that something would. My favourite was Theo, and whilst I can expect she would probably piss a lot of people off because she’s just so blunt and emotionally unavailable, there’s a whole lot of complexity underneath that tough girl exterior she puts up and it’s explored really well in the show. My least favourite was Shirley, by quite a long way actually. I just found Shirley to be intentionally confrontational, difficult, and always needing to be morally superior to her siblings in her own way. She runs a funeral home and puts herself in charge of overseeing Nell’s funeral arrangements, even going so far as preparing the body. The toll it takes on her is certainly engaging, but her constant need to attack someone close to her for some kind of personal validation got grating pretty quick.
The final five episodes deal with Nell's funeral and burial. Episode six in particular was a real favourite of mine as all the siblings and their estranged father reunite for the first time in years. By this point we already know everyone and have a pretty good understanding of what happened during their childhood, but from the point on the show wants to challenge what we know by presenting the same scenarios from different perspectives.
It reminds me a lot of Stephen King, particularly IT. Which is only a good thing as IT is one of my all-time favourite horror stories.
The first five episodes all take place in the day leading up to Nell’s death, with her suicide acting as each episode's finale. It’s told through the perspective of each of the five Crain siblings, going from eldest to youngest. The more episodes we see the more we begin to understand what happened at Hill House, and how it has permanently damaged each member of the family.
Each of the siblings has something you’ll love and hate about them, which is exactly what you need in a show like this. You like them enough to not want anything bad to happen to them, but they’ll piss you off enough that you sometimes find yourself wishing that something would. My favourite was Theo, and whilst I can expect she would probably piss a lot of people off because she’s just so blunt and emotionally unavailable, there’s a whole lot of complexity underneath that tough girl exterior she puts up and it’s explored really well in the show. My least favourite was Shirley, by quite a long way actually. I just found Shirley to be intentionally confrontational, difficult, and always needing to be morally superior to her siblings in her own way. She runs a funeral home and puts herself in charge of overseeing Nell’s funeral arrangements, even going so far as preparing the body. The toll it takes on her is certainly engaging, but her constant need to attack someone close to her for some kind of personal validation got grating pretty quick.
The final five episodes deal with Nell's funeral and burial. Episode six in particular was a real favourite of mine as all the siblings and their estranged father reunite for the first time in years. By this point we already know everyone and have a pretty good understanding of what happened during their childhood, but from the point on the show wants to challenge what we know by presenting the same scenarios from different perspectives.
It reminds me a lot of Stephen King, particularly IT. Which is only a good thing as IT is one of my all-time favourite horror stories.
But what doesn’t work? I feel that the family’s patriarch Hugh (Timothy Hutton & Henry Thomas) isn’t given enough depth, which is surprising considering he gets quite a lot of screen time. His children hate him and it’s never really explained why. It stems from him ‘abandoning’ them following the night of their mother's murder/suicide at Hill House, but he insists there’s reasons behind it which aren’t given anywhere near as much attention as they should have. I also found the ending somewhat unsatisfying. Hill House remains as much of a mystery as it was when the series started but now we know that the ghosts are real and not just collective trauma. Is it the house that is malicious? Is it the ghosts that inhabit it? Ambiguous endings aren’t bad but when you get a half-arsed attempt at directing you towards an answer, only for it to lead nowhere, that’s not ambiguous, it’s just lazy.
The Haunting of Hill House is absolutely worth your time if you’re a horror fan, and thankfully it doesn’t rely too much on cheap jump scares to elicit fear from you. Instead, Hill House relies on slowly ratcheting the tension up until its explosive finale. You’re never too comfortable watching Hill House, but you are lured into a false sense of comfort for it only to be ripped away from you with creepy ghosts lingering in the background of shots, or for the fantastic sound design to have you messing your pants before anything happens on screen.
The Haunting of Hill House is absolutely worth your time if you’re a horror fan, and thankfully it doesn’t rely too much on cheap jump scares to elicit fear from you. Instead, Hill House relies on slowly ratcheting the tension up until its explosive finale. You’re never too comfortable watching Hill House, but you are lured into a false sense of comfort for it only to be ripped away from you with creepy ghosts lingering in the background of shots, or for the fantastic sound design to have you messing your pants before anything happens on screen.