Thanks, I Hate It: The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson is the greatest horror writer of the 20th century. Barker and King come close, and their imagery surpasses hers, but they lack her depth of empathy, her subtle gift for understanding and depicting the dark machine of the human subconscious pursuing its own destruction. Mike Flanagan’s loose adaptation of her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is to Jackson’s work as that image of Christ burned into the side of a grilled cheese is to the beatific agony of the Savior’s crucifixion at Golgotha. 

We’ll begin with the sets. No physical location in the entire show looks like a place where real humans might live. Everything looks like a remodeled office park, spare and white and fluorescent-lit, awful pile carpet stretching in gray oceans between walls. The Boston gay bar Theo Crain (Kate Siegel) frequents early on—a stylishly minimalist den of deep shadows and burning red neon—resembles no actual bar within fifty miles of the Massachusetts border. Even the titular Hill House is devoid of dust and—except for a symbolic patch of mold in the basement—untouched by rot, too blandly pristine to contain the nebulous domestic horrors to which the show aspires.

The ghosts themselves are not much better, sunken-eyed spooks with filmy eyes and cartoonish webs of black veins under their clammy skin. They look like out of work rejects from the Silent Hill bestiary, empty of any meaningful physicality or psychosexual tension. They wail from dark corners and float behind the cursed members of the Crain family, as non-specifically malignant as Luke’s (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) addiction to heroin or Theo’s feelings of emptiness (explored in maybe the most overwrought monologue in recent television history). Nothing in The Haunting of Hill House feels specific or relatable. It’s an uninspired brew of “family is important, but difficult” and visuals right out of one of James Wan’s forgettable horror procedurals. The nods to Jackson’s original work actually make it worse, lines and monologues excised from their original context and redeployed seemingly at random.

The long-take episode set in eldest daughter Shirley’s (Elizabeth Reaser) funeral home is a perfect encapsulation of the series’ visual sensibility. The camera roves between the various Crains as they get drunk, eat bland-looking canapés (I don’t think there’s a single thoughtful shot of food in the entire show), and yell joylessly at each other. There’s no sense that these people really know each other, and not in a “drifted apart” way, more like they’re pissy coworkers on their first office retreat. Why use a long take to show any of this? Why go to the trouble of all that shadowy trickery if it’s in service to nothing but the blandest, most washed-out family conflict imaginable? I can only guess it’s because Netflix’s infamous algorithm demanded it.

It’s the denaturing of Jackson’s story about lesbian denial, self-loathing, and repression that hits hardest. When the phantom Poppy Hill (Catherine Parker) convinces family matriarch Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino) that the only way to keep her family together is to kill them within the bounds of Hill House, trapping them there forever as ageless children it seems like the story is set for a standard, intelligible “learning to let go” plot. Instead it falls apart like a sodden cake, the family returning to Hill House after ten inexorable hours to get their generic fears thrown back in their faces and confront their mother’s still-covetous ghost. 

And then, suddenly, the house is good and safe and loving, transformed by the family’s reconciliation. Hugh joins Olivia there for eternity. The caretakers die there on purpose to spend the afterlife with their dead daughter. We learn that when the family lived there the house provided a secret room for each of them, giving them what they most needed. This is all a happy thing, scored with heart-tugging strings and backed by a saccharine monologue which unforgivably mutilates Jackson’s opening graf. “Whatever walked there, it walked together,” is a perversion of the original work, a blithe brushing off of its deep and painful insight into human isolation. Haunting of Hill House looks like an episode of CSI, reads like a Chicken Soup for the Soul collection, and tastes like sugared shit.