Review of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson has been adapted many times. It has become, in popular culture, the quintessential haunted house story, although Shirley Jackson’s novel leaves the veracity of the haunting intentionally ambiguous. One thing many adaptations struggle with is how to maintain that ambiguity while still evoking horror. The recent Netflix series, directed by Mike Flanagan, accomplishes this balance by diverging from the source material significantly while preserving its central themes. This series arrived on Netflix in 2018, so I’m a little late to the bandwagon. But I finally finished watching it and wanted to share a few of my thoughts with you.

The Haunting of Hill House is a ten-episode television series loosely based on Shirley Jackson’s novel of the same name. While not a straight adaptation, it includes enough nods and references to the original text that fans of Jackson’s works will get something extra out of it. The show features an ensemble cast, but rather than a group of strangers like in the book, the new residents of Hill House are all members of the fruitful Crain family. Clara and Hugh Crain are interior designers who make their living by flipping old houses. They move their family into Hill House for the summer with the idea of renovating it and selling it for enough money to finally buy their dream home. However, something goes wrong, and Hugh flees the house in the middle of the night with the five Crain children: Steve, Shirley, Theo, Luke, and Nell. The story follows a dual timeline, flashing back and forth between the Crains facing a new tragedy as adults and their time in Hill House as children. Using this nonlinear format, the show slowly pieces together what happened on the fateful night that drove the Crains from Hill House.

In my opinion, this show is one of the scariest pieces of horror media that I’ve seen in the last few years. One way that Hill House achieves this is by combining horrific jump scares with a more cerebral form of terror. The ghosts of Hill House are truly frightening to behold—among the most memorable of these is Nell’s recurring night-terror vision of the Bent-Neck Lady, who drops unexpectedly out of the darkness with eerily distorted features and her neck at an unnatural angle. In most horror films, the jump scare is a cheap shock that fades away after that first rush of adrenaline. In Hill House however, after you recover from the first shock, you slowly begin to learn more about what these ghostly, decaying forms actually represent—and then they become frightening all over again in a new, deeper way.

Because, of course, ghosts aren’t the only frightening things in the world. The members of the Crain family are dealing with mental illness, addiction, and the lingering effects of trauma—all of which are tangled up in their experience of the supernatural. While Jackson tantalizes us with hints of Eleanor’s unbalanced mental state—is it the cause or an effect of her paranormal experiences?—the Netflix series tackles the topic of mental health head-on. From sleep paralysis to drug addiction, the Crain children suffer from genuine problems that might explain away some of their ghostly visions and experiences. But while the show treats the topics of psychological conditions and drug use with detail and nuance, the viewer can never quite dismiss the role of the paranormal. This ambiguity holds the tension of the story through to the final episode.

Have you wanted The Haunting of Hill House? What did you think of it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments! And let me know if you think I should do The Haunting of Bly Manor next.