It’s almost Halloween — time for every media company to trot out the ghouls and goblins in an attempt to placate the horror-obsessed who view this time of the year as the pinnacle of all holidays. I’m one of those people. I’m not a fan of slasher films or cheap jump scares. For me, the pinnacle of horror is the haunted house.
Haunted house stories tend to encapsulate all that I find fascinating in horror with a healthy dose of what I love in fiction in general. Ghost stories can have jump scares and gore and other cheap tricks, but typically a well-done ghost story is a blend of creeping dread and character studies. This is the basis of The Haunting of Hill House.
The Haunting of Hill House is a book by Shirley Jackson, one of the grand dames of horror. Netflix’s adaptation is not a faithful one, but it does offer up specific elements of the book. The show follows the Crain family as they move into Hill House in an attempt to flip the property for a big profit. Of course, Hill House is haunted, and over the course of their summer in the house, they are irrevocably changed by the house.
Beyond here lies spoilers.
Hugh and Olivia Crain are parents to five children: eldest Stephen, perfectionist Shirley, tough Theodora, and twins Nell and Luke. Hugh is the grounded Mr. Fix-it — the brawn behind the house reconstruction. Olivia is the stunning artist of the clan with brains to boot. She’s an architect and generally nurturing mom. She also has a secret, one the audience doesn’t learn until about halfway through the series: she comes from a long line of psychically sensitive women. Her children, by and large, have inherited her gifts. Nell and Luke have twin sense and also see ghosts. Nell is plagued by the Bent-Neck Woman, who turns up while she sleeps. Luke sees a tall man wearing a suit and a bowler hat. Theo can gain knowledge via touching people or objects: she correctly identifies an expensive bottle of wine, among other things. Shirley doesn’t seem involved in the hauntings so much as her younger siblings and Stephen not at all.
The summer of renovation is only half the story, though. We also get to watch the Crain family some 20 years later; all the children are adults, estranged from their father. Lovely Olivia Crain? Well, she’s dead of an apparent suicide.
As an adult, Stephen is a writer who tells ghost stories, though he claims he’s never seen a ghost himself. His most famous work is the story of the summer spent in Hill House. Shirley is a mortician/funeral director. Theo uses her touch sense as a child psychologist. Nell is sensitive, unstable, and a little off the rails. Luke is a drug addict.
The story goes back and forth, telling the tale of what happened then and how it’s bringing the Crain family back together in a painful way now. It slowly unwinds the story of how the family was haunted and what happened to Olivia Crane. It shows how dysfunctional all the children are as adults and how broken Hugh has become.
At the base of the series, it is a character study in seven chapters — one for each of the family members. Seven of the 10 episodes follow one character in particular; the first five episodes follow the children, while the final five are either thematic episodes, like the knockout episode six (which features an amazing 20-minute long continuous shot of the entire family fighting in the present day amidst a huge storm), and the finale, which ultimately is about all of them.
All of the family members are fully fleshed-out characters, though the supporting characters are fairly shallow (a fact the show itself mocks in the finale). Theo (Kate Siegel) stands out as especially well done — she was my favorite of the cast, hands down. Hugh is played as a young father by ET’s Henry Thomas, and in the present day, by Timothy Hutton. The two actors pull it off so well. Olivia (Carla Gugino) swans around the Hill House set in so many incredible robes and dressing gowns that I started to wonder just how much time the costumers spent on robes alone. She is graceful and feminine, like a classic film star of the black and white era. Adult Stephen (Michiel Huisman, best known as Game of Throne’s Daario Naharis), is very much a willfully ignorant, self-obsessed yet sensitive writer. Elizabeth Reaser, who played adult Shirley, will forever be Rebecca from Grey’s Anatomy (though most people remember her as Twilight’s Esme Cullen). Oliver Jackson-Cohen is the tortured, heroin-addicted adult Luke, and Victoria Pedretti is the emotionally shattered and tragic adult Nell. Of the children, the stand-out cast member is young Nell, played by Violet McGraw.
The cast is large and wonderful, each of them with an embarrassment of speeches that would make any stage actor jealous. Even the couple who play Hill House’s caretakers, played by Annabeth Gish and Robert Longstreet, fill out the edges of the cast with their sometimes off-putting and always on-point performances. Longstreet’s story of their first child, in particular, is particularly well done.
Speaking of the cast, there’s a strange and somewhat wonderful dichotomy between the men and the women of Hill House. The male cast (the living characters, anyway) is entirely comprised of kind-faced men, many of whom sport a variety of immaculately shaped beards. Seriously, beard styles are almost as prevalent as the women’s hairstyles. It is the male answer to the glorious femininity of Olivia’s dressing gowns, the makeup department’s yin to the costume department’s yang. It almost watches as a commercial for great beards and their beard trimmers.
Meanwhile, the women, while beautiful, are the bearers of hard-faced, angry, or terrified expressions. The women are allowed far more leeway of expression. It’s interesting to see, and very much the opposite of the norm. The ghosts aren’t immune to this, either. The male ghosts lurk and scare, but it’s the female ghosts who are behind all the jumpscares, screams and active haunting.
So what else is good in Hill House? There is a lot. Easter egg hunters should be particularly fond of the series; there’s stuff in the background, as well as nods to other pop culture items, everywhere. Looking for background ghosts is like playing a spooky version of Where’s Waldo. For Shirley Jackson fans, we see characters reading her other books (notably, one of the children is reading The Lottery while the family plays outside). Adult Shirley’s son wants to be Daredevil for Halloween, and later turns up dressed up as the Netflix version of Daredevil. When Shirley finds kittens, she notes there’s one for each child — a Game of Thrones reference to the Stark children and their direwolf pups maybe? The model of the Forever Home, and the little bit of haunted life it shows throughout the series might just be a reference to Hereditary. Considering Hereditary was one of the year’s scariest films, it would make sense.
One of the constant themes of the show is the back and forth argument of “Are they haunted?” or “Does mental illness plague the family?” Stephen seems to believe the latter, while those who adhere to the former theory are either silent about their opinion or perceived as the mentally ill of the family. Twins Nell and Luke are especially prone to this mentality, with the former treated as fragile and the latter looked down on for his choice of coping mechanism (drugs). While haunting as a metaphor for mental illness is nothing new, this is more haunting as a cause of mental illness. The family is collectively traumatized, and they all show it in different ways.
Mental illness is a fairly open topic for the series. Specifically, the effects of suicide on a family. There is a frankness (and anger) in which suicide is discussed. It’s incredibly personal, and really well done. Netflix has come under fire for the way it’s discussed suicide in shows. The train wreck that is 13 Reasons Why, notably, glamorized suicide while dissuading teens from reaching out to available resources like school counselors, who are literally trained to help with situations like suicide. If a show bears any responsibility to its audience, Hill House lives up to this responsibility in its portrayal of the devastating effects of suicide on the family left behind. While this conversation takes place amidst a mystery of was it suicide or death by haunting, it doesn’t change the conversation.
With any good haunted house story, Hill House is not just the setting, but a presence in the show. It’s the eighth member of the family. It’s a monster who devours, the characters repeatedly tell us. The ghosts are often agents of the house, like digestive fluids, eating away at the Crain family’s sanity.
The house emotes throughout the show in a variety of ways. The set design is often responsible for the creeping dread the house brings forth. At the same time, the sets during daylight offer up a completely different feel for the house. Sometimes its a house straight out of a feel-good Victorian children’s story, like The Secret Garden. It appears warm and affectionate to the family. At night, all bets are off. The same wallpaper and furniture loom menacingly. It also works against the least ghost-sensitive duo in the past scenes: young Stephen and Hugh.
For Hugh, the summer of Hill House is a tale of a house renovation gone spectacularly wrong. He tackles everything structurally wrong with the house, his apprentice Stephen in tow, with the motto “I can fix it!” Turns out, hauntings aren’t as easily repaired as peeling wallpaper, and the house manifests it’s undead infestation in physical ways that drives Hugh to his wit’s end.
Notably, the tearing down of the basement walls. While tearing down walls in an old home is one of the home renovation tasks better left to professionals (as the mold specialists tell Hugh), he does it anyway. In a normal home, you can expose yourself to asbestos. In Hill House, it’s a preternatural black mold and, of course, a corpse. What follows is a breakdown of sorts that conveniently keeps the most stable member of the Crain clan not only occupied, but obsessed, while the rest of the family falls apart. It’s directly responsible for Olivia getting to her point of no return and the tragedy that haunts the children into their adulthood.
One of the nicer parts of the show is the way it leaves all the breadcrumbs of the mystery laid out for the audience. There is no last-minute “a-ha!” that prevents the audience from seeing what’s happening all along. Most of the major mysteries I had at least partially put together before the big reveals. I’m a fan of solvable puzzles, especially when the clues are subtle enough that those who prefer to be surprised by the reveal won’t have anything spoiled for them ahead of time. It’s well done.
And for those of you who prefer to see time as a flat circle rather than a line, you’ll be pleased. The show features a great deal of what Doctor Who calls wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. When the answer to a mystery isn’t how, it’s often when.
If the show does have a major flaw (and I don’t concede that it does), it might be in how horror fans perceive the finale. Rather than the kind of over-the-top violent, screaming ghosts and gory ends finale, this series features a much softer, more tender finale. It drives home the point that while it is a ghost story, Hill House is, at its heart of hearts, a character study. It’s a poignant close with a satisfying resolution. The mysteries are all solved. It’s the kind of graceful closure that a lot of series are missing; it doesn’t fish for a second season. The 10-episode series is fantastic Halloween fare — spooky but not over-the-top, atmospheric and creepy. It’s well worth multiple watches.