The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a landmark novel of the horror genre, a stone-cold classic of unbridled psychological dread and tension. It has been adapted as a movie twice and even as a play (I acted in a production of it back in 2019. I played Dr. Montague. Don't ask how my beard looked.)

Director Mike Flanagan adapts the novel for Netflix as a ten-part television series, each episode between 50 and 60 minutes long. It's not a faithful adaptation; the book by itself would not be enough fill out such a length. Instead, Flanagan takes the themes, characters, and plot devices and re-contextualizes into an expanded narrative.

The results are outstanding. I don't consider myself a binge watcher, but I completed the series in about a day and a half. Flanagan has shown promise as a filmmaker, and here, he creates his best work to-date. It's strongly acted and smartly written, with enough scares and drama to be one of horror's most compelling television works in recent years.

The novel followed an investigation into the notorious Hill House, a famous haunted house possibly "born bad." It's a mostly contained story over the course a relatively short time, and there's ambiguity about whether the supernatural phenomena are genuine or products of the characters' imagination, particularly Eleanor "Nell" Vance.

Flanagan mixes and matches backstory from the house and the characters, he invents some of his own, and he modernizes the story. In the book, Hugh Crain was the man who built Hill House for his wife. In the series, Hugh Crain is a man who flips houses. He buys Hill House and moves in with his family - wife Olivia and children Steven, Shirley, Theodora, and twins Luke and Nell.

Something bad happens one night at Hill House, leaving Olivia dead as Hugh flees with the kids. Decades later, the children are grown up with their own problems, Hugh is long estranged from them, but something from the house calls Nell back, which prompts all of the surviving the Crains to confront the ghosts from their pasts, literal and figurative.

The Haunting of Hill House moves back and forth between timelines, when the Crains live there and years later. As the story progresses, we learn a little more about what happened during their time in that haunted house, and we see how those events have affected the Crains. This was a loving, happy family that was splintered and crushed by what happened all those years ago. Now, they're dysfunctional and aloof from each other, and when they interact, they fight and bicker.

Each episode more or less concentrates on an individual member of the family. Across multiple episodes, we will see the same event from multiple perspectives, giving new insights, some sad, some horrifying. Early on, Steven finds Luke seemingly robbing him to support his drug habit; it's not until later we learn that's not the case.

The series contains its fair share of shocks. Ghostly apparitions pop out of nowhere, accompanied by a loud musical sting, to get people to jump, but the real fear stems from the realization of horrible truth. As a child, Nell was haunted by a figure she dubbed the Bent Neck Lady; the identity of the Bent Neck Lady is more tragic and terrifying. The House uses its power to play on the hopes and fears of its victims, to lure them in and destroy them.

I confess I was skeptical about a television series of The Haunting of Hill House working. I thought it would have to be padded to the gills to fill out such a length, but the new material is compelling in its own right while staying faithful to the spirit of the book. The characters are richly drawn, and I was strongly invested in seeing how their fates played out. As petty and squabbling as the Crains became, I rooted for them.