The Haunting Of Hill House

You know what there isn’t enough of? Good horror. 

You know what there especially isn’t enough of? Good horror TV shows. This is a shame, because the format would seem to solve a lot of the issues that plague horror movies, the slower pace and much longer run-time of a series allowing for more subtlety and a lighter touch with the scares. And yet, most supposedly scary TV shows are either not scary at all, or only sporadically scary.

So when Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House arrived in 2018, cries of joy were heard o’er the land and the series was turned into an anthology whose second season, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, is coming out soon (and will be reviewed on this very blog, so watch out for that). Does it live up to its reputation? Let’s see.

Based very, very, loosely on the famous novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, The Haunting Of Hill House follows the misfortunes of the Crain family across two time periods. In the past, Hugh and Olivia Crain and their five children move into the titular gothic manor with the intention of renovating and selling it so that they can build their “dream home”. It does not go according to plan, as the supernatural forces that live in the house prey on the latent streak of psychic ability that manifests in the children via Olivia’s maternal line, culminating in a final terrifying night during which Olivia, seemingly in the grip of some sort of possession, kills herself while Hugh and the children flee for their lives.

In the present, the kids are all grown up and estranged from Hugh due to his refusal to tell them what really happened to their mother and the general sketchiness of the whole situation (Hugh returned to the house for unknown reasons and was the sole witness to Olivia’s death; he managed to avoid being formally accused of murder, but some of the kids are still harbouring suspicions). Eldest son Stephen spun the Hill House experience into a successful career as a non-fiction author and alienated half of his siblings in the process, Shirley is a funeral home director who still sometimes has prophetic dreams, Theo uses her ability of telepathic touch as a child psychologist, and twins Luke and Nell are respectively a drug addict and a grief-stricken wreck. It’s one big happy family!

The trauma of Hill House and their mother’s death looms over all of their lives, unaddressed and unresolved, until Nell returns to the house in a bid to escape the terrifying “bent neck lady” that’s been haunting her since childhood. She winds up dead in a manner similar to her mother, and as the family comes together for her funeral both the past and a variety of spooky ghosts show up to haunt them.

So this is a fairly ambitious format, separating the show into two time-frames and about six different individual strands, with each member of the Crain family getting their own personal story that intertwines with the others and also flashes back and forth between the past and the present. It’s a very jigsaw-puzzle approach, with the five Crain children’s experiences in the house, their adult lives since then, the circumstances of Nell’s death and that last fateful night getting gradually filled out episode by episode. This is the sort of thing that could turn into a tiresome Lost-esque situation if dragged out over the course of multiple seasons, but the fact that this is a single self-contained season means that nothing stays mysterious for too long and new bits of information get dropped with a pleasingly snappy cadence.

The story revolves heavily around family drama, which is dangerous territory because American TV shows frequently use family drama as a way to fill space that doesn’t actually contribute anything to the plot--think back on how many shows you’ve seen where there’ll be a running sub-plot about the mom fighting with her rebellious daughter or whatever, only for the matter to be unceremoniously dropped without resolution--but here it’s the focal point of the plot. The show quite cleverly keeps the mysteries and supernatural forces of Hill House at arms length for most of its episodes, focusing instead on how those things impacted the Crains during their time in the house and the way that impact has continued into their later lives. The questions the show asks aren’t “how would a big house get mega-haunted by tons of ghosts” but “what would happen to an ordinary family if they lived in a big house that was mega-haunted by tons of ghosts?”

And make no mistake, there are indeed tons of ghosts. There isn’t just one ghost, or even five ghosts, there’s a whole bunch of ghosts! There are even secret bonus ghosts for sharp-eyed viewers to spot! The titular haunting doesn’t so much manifest as discrete entities that are bound to the house so much as a general supernatural malaise, which seems to pull from the house’s previous inhabitants but isn’t strictly limited to them.

I’ve talked before about the fine line horror walks between scary and stupid; with a few exceptions, The Haunting of Hill House stays firmly on the right side of that divide, utilizing spooks that are often not terribly subtle in concept but are still understated in execution. There’s an appropriately gothic, old-fashioned quality to the horror scenes, but with some of the more dated embellishments sanded down for modern audiences. Towards the end of the series, when it’s time for the evil of Hill House to stop lurking in the background and show itself, we do get some more over the top supernatural manifestations, including my arch-enemy, Ghosts That Talk. But even here, the series employs a relatively light touch until it's time for the spooktacular climax.

When The Haunting Of Hill House does occasionally go too far, it’s actually on the drama side of things, which can at times descend into maudlin territory. Episode two puts young Shirley through a conga-line of minor traumas that gets a little silly, especially since it’s mostly in service of explaining why she grew up to become a funeral director (a profession that people apparently can’t go into without some sort of death-related hangup in their past), and there’s a very contrived infidelity sub-plot in the latter half that thankfully gets resolved relatively quickly.

My only other substantial complaint about the show is that the last episode gets a bit messy, in a very “Stephen King just hit his word limit so it’s time for psychic visions to wrap the plot up” sort of way that maybe one additional episode would have fixed. Not a big deal by any means, but still worth noting.

The Haunting Of Hill House apparently did quite well for Netflix, as it’s morphed into a house-based anthology series whose second installment is coming out in a few days. It remains to be seen whether the series can survive the Netflix three season cancellation curse, but I’ll be checking out Bly Manor to review. Regardless of how that turns out, Hill House stands alone (holding darkness within, one might say) as a quality horror offering.