The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

Netflix has made some great spooky TV shows lately. One of them I've just finished is The Haunting of Hill House, a ten-episode series based on the novel by Shirley Jackson. While it does succumb to some cliches, but mostly is effective mind twisting.

The only thing in common with the Jackson novel is the house (with some character names from the book applied to other people, and one character named Shirley, surely a tribute to Jackson). Hill House is a giant Gothic mansion somewhere in Massachusetts. The Crain family, mom and dad and five kids, have moved in for the summer of 1992, with the idea of restoring and flipping it. But pretty soon weird things start happening. Little Nell sees a "bent-neck lady." Luke plays with a girl who lives in the woods. And the mom, Carla Gugino, is slowly losing her mind.

The series, created by Mike Flanagan, bounces back among time periods, and it does take some attention to keep it straight. Mostly it is set during that summer, and the present day, when one of the kids goes back to the house and seemingly commits suicide. The children have grown up unable to shake that summer. Steve (Michael Huisman) has become successful writing books about haunted places, though he doesn't believe in ghosts; Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) is an uptight mortician; Theodora (Kate Siegel) has to wear gloves but she can feel other people's pain when she touches them; Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is a heroin addict; and Nell (Victoria Pedretti) keeps seeing that "bent-neck lady."

It all comes to a head during the funeral of that suicidal child. Gugino had committed suicide on the last night in the house in '92, and the kids have resented their father (Henry Thomas) for not telling them all he knows. In the present, the dad is played by Tim Hutton (odd, since the two actors are only 13 years apart). He has been estranged from them, and they all have it out in O'Neillian fashion. The climax of the film has them all back in the house again, where they finally get into the "red room," which had been previously closed off to them, or so they thought.

"Ghosts are guilt, secrets, regrets and failings," Huisman says. "Ghosts are wishes." And indeed, though  there are real ghosts in The Haunting of Hill House, they largely serve as metaphors for the psychological torments we all go through. I would have liked more information about the ghosts. We know that one of them is Poppy Hill, the flapper who lived there before, and an old lady who spent her entire days in bed (in one of the best shots, a character passes in the foreground while the old lady, unnoticed, lies in her bed). A mummified body is found bricked behind a wall in the basement--is the ghost with the derby, who uses a cane yet floats above the ground? Perhaps a second series will tell us.

Flanagan's go-to scare is having a character see a ghost, then look back and nothing is there, which is kind of a cheat. There are only a few honest-to-goodness frights; most of it is just this feeling of dread. In both Jackson's book and this series the embodiment of evil is the house itself, and its origins remain a mystery. Maybe one day we'll find it's on an Indian burial ground.

Though it doesn't really break new ground in the haunted house genre, it is worthy, with solid acting (I like that the three girls actually look like they could be Gugino's daughters) and spooky cinematography. The dressing of the house, from the circular staircase (straight from Jackson) to the statuary garden, is spot on. Just the way the lights go on whenever someone drives up to the house, as if in malevolent greeting, gives one some goosebumps.