Given how it was just recently the season of Halloween, I decided I was in the mood to watch some scary shows/movies, so when I saw there was a massive crowd of praise following The Haunting of Hill House, I thought it was worth checking out. I get scared quite easily, yet I enjoy the horror genre given how it always produces the strongest visceral reactions from me. I thought I could handle the horror from this show; I was wrong. This show is terrifying in the best way possible. After one particular episode, which I regrettably watched before bed, I couldn’t turn off my lamp until I watched funny vine compilations and cat videos. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you can confront the horror, you’re in for a mostly-well executed story about broken family relationships, loss, and regret. However, this show is far from perfect, but the first six or so episodes are some of the finest television I've seen this year, and even the last few episodes still have stellar moments despite their faults.
Note: this show is actually based on a novel fyi, which I didn’t read, so I have no bias (though after this show, I'm compelled to read it sometime in the future). Also, SPOILER WARNING!
A Broken Family
The story follows the lives of five siblings who all suffered from horrific hauntings at the mansion of Hill House when they were all young children living with their parents, Hugh and Olivia. The catastrophic terror resulted in the children fleeing the house with Hugh and causing Olivia's "suicide." Long after they escape the house and the siblings are all full grown adults, the youngest sister, Nelle, returns to the forlorn house after being viciously haunted by a “Bent-Neck Lady.” She is found dead at the house, and it’s presumed she also killed herself. As the siblings try to cope with her unexpected death and try to make sense of it, the ghosts and memories of their pasts come back to plague them and are mixed in with their own present-day terrors. Tragically, the family just can't seem to stay in one room together without breaking out into a fight every other minute for a plethora of reasons.
Steven
The oldest sibling, who is “the most successful” out of all the siblings. He is a horror-nonfiction writer, and his most popular published work that jumpstarts his career is about the incidents he and his family underwent at Hill House. Though Steven’s career is built out of real horror, he doesn’t believe in the supernatural, and often dismisses people’s claims of seeing ghosts and instead insists they're all mentally ill in some way. He even believes the events of Hill House were all part of a mental illusion and that his family imagined the whole thing. Despite his success, he is currently going through a rough patch in life as he prioritizes his career over his family, and as result he doesn’t see his siblings as much and is kicked out of his house by his wife (which we later find out is actually about something gravely important, which I'll bring up later). Additionally, most of his siblings have a problem with how he used their trauma as a means of getting rich. As for his father, he holds a grudge against him for never explaining the truth about what happened that dreaded night at Hill House where they all fled without Olivia, and he blames Hugh for letting their family's "mental illness" go untreated.Honestly, besides the spooks, this show is mostly all about how many times each character can shit on Steven lol (and I'm here for all of it because it's well-deserved):
Shirley (It's hard not to refer her as Esme tbh, thanks Twilight)
Second eldest and oldest sister. She's a perfectionist and runs a funeral home with her husband and lives in the establishment with her family. After her mother's death at Hill House, she was terrified of seeing her dead and broken body, however, she develops an admiration for funerary work after she sees how perfectly put together and restored her mother's corpse is, hence her current job as a mortician (I've always found the custom of showing an open casket creepy and unnerving, but then again I also don't like the idea of someone preparing and plugging my dead corpse and letting it rot underground, just burn me and be done with it). After Nelle dies, she decides to prepare her sister's body for the funeral herself. She resents Steven for making a career out of their suffering and refuses to take any "blood money" from him, however, her business is in a dire state, and she discovers that her husband took money from Steven to save the business. To make matters worse, she catches her husband and Theo seemingly having an affair. As it turns out however, her husband was trying to push Theo away, and it's later revealed that Shirley is the real adulterer (lol trust me, I'll get there in a minute because it's so random and ridiculous).Theo
Theodora, Theo for short, is the middle sibling and has unique abilities. She is psychic in the way that she is very sensitive to people's touch and other objects that hold history, so she wears gloves and only takes them off when she purposely wants to figure out people's feelings/past memories. This psychic ability causes her much distress as it also aids her in her job as a child psychologist. As a result, she's quite distant from others and is particular about who can get close to her. Nonetheless, that doesn't stop her from living her best gay life and being sassy as hell. Underneath her tough rugged attitude, she's deeply compassionate. She lives in Shirley's guest house, but her relationship with her sister gets soiled when she admits that she took Steven's money to get her Ph.D and made a move on Shirley's husband. After Nelle's death, she grieves in anger, mad how Nelle's suicide is causing them all so much pain, but she uses her ability and touches Nelle's corpse to only end up feeling nothing, which carries on its effect quite literally, and Theo only begins to feel again after experiencing deep shame for betraying Shirley.Luke
Nelle's twin brother. Because of the strong tie he has with Nelle, they're able to sense each other's emotions and physical ailments. Besides her, Luke sees many horrors compared to his other siblings. He sees a ghost of a tall old man with a cain and top-hat who floats, and he constantly tells the others about a little girl he sees in the house. No one believes him, save for Nelle. Fast forward to his adult life; he's an addict struggling to get clean. He loses most of his siblings' trust after he steals from them and constantly breaks out of rehab. After some time, he's able to remain 90 days clean (I wonder if 90 is significant here given how he's also older than Nelle by 90 seconds), the longest he's ever been clean, but on the night of his sister's death, one of his friends breaks out from the rehab center, and he tries to get her back, but unfortunately she steals his money and he gets mugged after. Though he doesn't quickly realize Nelle's passing, he feels ill and extremely cold (undergoing rigor mortis) ; he knows for sure that Nelle didn't die by suicide. When he rejoins his family for her funeral, no one believes him, except for his father, though everyone thinks he has lost his mind. When he comes to the conclusion that Hill House is responsible for Nelle's murder, he takes it upon himself to try and burn the house down.Nelle
Ever since Hill House, she has been terrorized by the house. Next to her mother, Nelle is the second-most abused victim of the house as she often disappears from plain sight by the consuming forces of the house, and she is continuously visited by the Bent-Neck Lady. She suffers from sleep paralyses, being unable to move well after she wakes up. After escaping the house, the hauntings stop for a while and she lives a generally normal happy life despite her sleeping issues. She marries a sleep technician, but he dies in front of her one night during one of her paralysis episodes due to an "aneurysm," and Nelle starts seeing the Bent-Neck Lady once again. Progressively as the hauntings get worse, Nelle falls into a deep depression and feels alone in her torture. In order to overcome her fear and move on, she returns to Hill HouseThe Parents
Happily married, Hugh and Olivia are house flippers, and they take residence in Hill House with their kids one summer in hopes of polishing the house and selling it for a better price. They obviously get more than what they bargained for as the house terrorizes Olivia to madness. Hugh dismisses all his family's claims of seeing ghosts, passing them off as their childish imaginations and degrading mental attitude in the case of his wife. When it gets to be too much for her, the couple agree that she should take some time away from the house, however, she returns unannounced one night and is able to get into the infamous red room, which throughout the most of their time there remains "locked." Hugh finds her there with Nelle, Luke, and the poisoned corpse of the young girl Luke had been seeing. Turns out they were having a tea party, though Olivia (in her madness) had poured rat poison. Fearing for his children's lives, he takes them away from the house and leaves Olivia behind. During his absence, Olivia, compelled by Poppy Hill's ghost, jumps off the balcony in the library to "wake up," and she dies, but her ghost remains trapped eternally in the house.
Hugh returns to the house and finds her body, and the Dudleys (the housekeepers) show up looking for their daughter, which ends up being Luke's poisoned friend. The Dudleys had known the house was haunted and sheltered their daughter from Hill House to protect her. Hugh proposes to burn the house, but the Dudleys insist that he should leave it alone and just ensure nobody else gets consumed by it. He does just that and send his kids to live with their aunt. Hugh refuses to ever tell his children the full details of that night with the children, and they are raised by their aunt for the remainder of their childhood. As a result, the Olivia's ghost haunts him (it's more of a trick of his mind though instead of her literal ghost), though luckily she is her normal self and not whatever the house forced her to be. His biggest regret is distancing himself from them and it pains him how he can't easily open up about Hill House, but nonetheless, he still clearly loves his children.
Hugh returns to the house and finds her body, and the Dudleys (the housekeepers) show up looking for their daughter, which ends up being Luke's poisoned friend. The Dudleys had known the house was haunted and sheltered their daughter from Hill House to protect her. Hugh proposes to burn the house, but the Dudleys insist that he should leave it alone and just ensure nobody else gets consumed by it. He does just that and send his kids to live with their aunt. Hugh refuses to ever tell his children the full details of that night with the children, and they are raised by their aunt for the remainder of their childhood. As a result, the Olivia's ghost haunts him (it's more of a trick of his mind though instead of her literal ghost), though luckily she is her normal self and not whatever the house forced her to be. His biggest regret is distancing himself from them and it pains him how he can't easily open up about Hill House, but nonetheless, he still clearly loves his children.
The Spoopy Spooks
One of my favorite elements in the show is how it'll try to scare you without making it obvious by putting the scares in the background. Every now and then you'll notice ghost and statues in the house in different positions, but they are never the focus of the scene. Episode 6 uses the creative technique of a rotating camera that hardly makes any cutaways for the whole episode. The scare that got me the most was seeing Nelle's Bent-Neck Lady ghost standing behind her family as they look at her casket. It's easy to miss her if you're paying attention to the siblings and their father conversing with each other in the foreground, but when you do see her in the middle of a calm setting, the peaceful atmosphere is immediately broken, and from hereon-out, my guard was up as I was constantly looking for any ghosts lurking in the background.
The Bad Stuff
While the scares and tension are skillfully harrowing, the writing starts to wane at around the last four episodes. Up until then, I have enjoyed being immersed in each of the siblings' stories and the mysterious forces of Hill House, but in effort to write a bittersweet ending, the writing neglects its female cast. As Hugh and Steven go after Luke in Hill House, they are made to be the saviors of this tale. Luke, despite his recklessness, is meant to be praised for recognizing the paranormal forces that killed Nelle and Olivia, and for making the effort to avenge his family by fighting the house. Hugh is the tragic figure, finally seeing the light by telling Stephen the truth, which in turn makes his son finally come to terms with the ghosts. Hugh kills himself at the house to take his children's place and look after Olivia and Nelle. He places the burden of keeping people away from the house and protecting his family on Stephen, but it sucks that he's instructed to not tell his siblings about Hugh's sacrifice till after they've long escaped the house.
The men becoming the redeemed tragic heroes in itself isn't a bad thing, however, it comes at the cost of the women as they basically do nothing and become mere observers to the house's terror in the end. Shirley and Theo get into it while they decide to go after their brothers and dad, and Theo has this long monologue about how she felt nothing. Mind you, it's a beautiful monologue that delves into what grief can do to a person, but it amounts to nothing, ironically, because the development of these female characters comes to a full stop afterwards. As for Shirley, we get this oddly-placed subplot where she is seen having an affair long ago at a bar after a work conference, and this is all to demonstrate how she isn't "perfect." It does jack shit to the story. If anything, it was probably there to makes us, the audience, throw daggers at her to get her even with her husband (insert eye-roll); though we honestly didn't need this scene to prove her imperfection because the lady is anxious as hell to begin with and holds grudges like it's no one's business, making her affair even more pointless. Even Nelle's last act of heroism where she saves her siblings from being trapped in house-induced horrors is trumped by Hugh's sacrifice.
Back to Stephen, I wanted to like him, and the show tries to push us to like him given his "redemption," but I simply couldn't care for him that much by the end given how for the majority of the series he's seen as a dismissive dick. He has the least interesting development compared to the other characters, so much so that his wife, meant to be a supporting role for him, is immensely more compelling than he is given how she's betrayed by her own husband. He has a stick so far up his ass about the whole mental-illness conspiracy that he got a vasectomy to ensure he would never have children suffering from those ailments, yet he married his wife anyway while omitting his vasectomy knowing full-well she wanted children. That alone makes his crimes much worse than simply refusing to believe in ghosts because it makes him even more of a selfish asshole. Granted we knew he was selfish when he was willing to exploit his family's suffering for some bucks, but his lie to his wife paints a much darker portrait of him than any of the horrors in the story. For as much as the first 5-6 episodes set up the importance of each sibling, the power dynamics shift, making Stephen more of an overshadowing protagonist and putting him at the forefront on a lonely pedestal for becoming the "good older brother." I just feel like his redemption comes too little too late after everything that's happened, and it's odd how quickly everything is tied up, forgiven, and fixed into a neat little bow, contradicting the show's message of not being able to fix everything that is broken.
Anyway, so Stephen, Shirley, Theo, and Luke all get a happy ending, which is fine and dandy. And I'll admit it, I shed a few tears, especially when the Dudleys, old and gray, return to the house to die there and be with their daughters for all eternity. It was also nice seeing Luke celebrating his 2-years clean and Theo moving out of Shirley's guesthouse and ending up with the girl from the club. But all their success in the end gets a sour taste when you realize the heroes in this series are the men, and the only two victims of the family are vulnerable women failed by the men in their lives, leaving the other two women as bystanders (Also, Stephen's wife ends up pregnant and happy with him, which in my opinion is too easy of a solution for him, talk about lazy Gary Stu writing).
Not to mention the ending feels a little like a repeat of American Horror Story: Murder House in how Hill House becomes a coop for tragic ghost families to reunite, which is supposed to make it a little better than an all-consuming and hellish "stomach" it was originally made out to be. It just feels weird and nonsensical that the grand evil in the house, that was clever enough to lure its prey with the Red Room by becoming havens for the soon-to-be victims, is all the sudden mitigated and downplayed by these tragic figures and made to be a comfortable home after death.
To end my critique, it's also curious how this "evil", primarily manifested in the feminine shape of Poppy and Olivia, is only quelled when the patriarch decides to stay in the house to contain this female rage.
In Short
I do think The Haunting of Hill House is still a fine piece of work and quite honestly one of best Netflix series this year. It's still worth the watch if you want to see some skillfully-composed horror and good camera work, but it falls short in the end by throwing all the glory to the woeful and pained men (We all really know Theo and Shirley are better at kicking ass anyway, or punching boobs. And in fairness, I can't help but love Luke.). And it's certainly a show I wouldn't mind revisiting later on. But we should see this show as a calling sign and dire need for more lead women writers, especially in works that involve female leads. |
| Female contribution is great, but damn do we need more than the crumbs of 1-2 episodes. |
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