I watched The Haunting of Hill House as part of my The Horror! Halloween updates, but as this is a show with 10 episodes it’s a much bigger story and commitment compared to a movie. Plus, I liked it a lot so I can write more about it.
The Crains, lead by mom and dad Olivia and Hugh, move their family into Hill House in 1992. Their five children, 2 boys, 3 girls aged 7-13 or so, come along as their parents are on the final leg of their “forever home” mission. Once they fix up and flip Hill House, they’ll have the money to build their dream home. The problem is, Hill House is super haunted.
The story of the Crain family is told in the past and the present. You never get the tale in a linear fashion, it jumps back and forth from 1992 and 2018 as the Crains are drawn back to the house, remembering chunks of the horrors they went through when they moved into the house.
The kids notice something is off about the house almost right away. It’s very simple and subtle stuff like one of the kids mentioning that the house is cold (they move into the house during the early summer months with plans to move out sometime in August). The weirdness grows from there like a red door that no one can open on the top floor and strange noises. Then the ghosts start appearing to the kids and Olivia becomes more and more affected as time goes by.
The whole series is largely devoid of violence and gore. The ghosts are the most gruesome things on display (very corpse-like) along with some disturbing images (like missing eyes) when the main characters have nightmares/hallucinations. The show leans on the creepy and disturbing for its scares. While there quite a few startle scares, violence and gore are never used as a showcase/scare tactic. It’s a decision that often works very well (I think jump scares with orchestra hits are a super cheap tactic but I think what you get here is pretty reserved in this regard). The show is a slow burn so the haunting is very subtle until the end of episode 3. From there, it escalates faster with each episode. What happened on the last night in Hill House is largely unknown to the kids and that secret is held by Hugh. One that the House forces out of him.
The shifts in time worked way better than I thought it would. The strange events that happen early on in 1992 are often re-visited later. For example, what one thinks at one point is simply the ghosts messing about is actually much more than that. The house does things for specific reasons, things are connected way more than you think, and that realization is one of the greatest parts of the show. Episode 5, “The Bent-Neck Lady” is my favorite for this reason. This episode has the most horrific part in the entire season in its final minutes. Brilliantly done, it blew my mind when I saw it. Runner-up goes to the cellar scene in episode 3 that made me say “Oh fuck!” out loud. If that happened to me at that age, there is no way I would have recovered from it.
Along with all of this storytelling praise comes another shovel full when I talk about the cast. The five kids are all amazing actors. This entire project would have been a failure without this quality of a cast. They’re all fantastic and the emotions they get shoved through are immense and show incredible range. I completely believed that these people were actually family members (I got really attached to Nell and Luke, both as kids and adults).
The family is the most important aspect of the show. The introduction is simple and slow at the start but over the 10 episodes, time is given to each character so by the end you really know them. Luke and Nell are very close as they are twins, Theo is the oddball middle child, and Shirly and Steven as the oldest kids, emulating their loving parents, Olivia and Hugh. When the final credits rolled, I appreciated all the effort that was put into fleshing each family member out. No one is two dimensional.
The time inside Hill House traumatized them all and that trauma stayed with them all for 26 years. It’s sculpted who they in present day. The secrets come out and you get a much deeper understanding of their relationships with each other. Some are walking disasters (Luke) while others are just better at hiding it (Hugh and Shirley). Hill House caused this family a lot of pain and anger and changed the family dynamic. As much as the house is haunted, so is the family that hadn’t set foot on the property in 26 years. It’s the exorcism of those demons that the show revolves around.
Production wise this one is a knockout too. Every episode looks like it cost a million bucks and think this is one of Netflix’s best original programs. Watch it.