One of the most common staples in the horror genre is the haunted house. Those austere, alarming Amityville of books, film and television, where unsuspecting families must deal with supernatural surprises and malevolent maladies that bleed through the walls, jump out at the most inopportune times and reveal deep, dark secrets about the haunt’s surroundings, the characters in the labyrinth and, really, about ourselves in the audience.
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Family-based horror also seems to be the spook du jour for 2018 —Ari Aster‘s A24 chiller “Hereditary” already terrorized audiences this summer with little mouth clicks, little ants and miniature houses. In that suffocating work, Aster postured that, sometimes, you can’t run from your past, and you certainly can’t run from your family.
In Netflix’s new haunted house horror-drama “The Haunting of Hill House,” ascending genre talent Mike Flanagan (“Gerald’s Game” and “Ouija: Origin of Evil“) takes Aster’s idea of the inescapable bonds to a family’s past and massages it out a bit. Rather than leading a fraught flock through a maze of contempt and paralyzing predestination, Flanagan wants to look at what happens after you’re haunted by the house and how you choose to get over it and reconcile with those you were haunted with. Oh, they both have those creepy little miniatures, too.
Of course, you know the Hill House from its ’50s novel, and subsequent film adaptations, which were more direct takes on author Shirley Jackson‘s work. Here, Flanagan tries to expand and deepen the central themes from the novel and place them into the familial unit. The refreshed Crain family dips and dives between its early-’90s haunting and the present-day consequences of the events that claimed their mother (Carla Gugino) and fractured the relationships the Crain children had with each other and with their father Hugh (Henry Thomas then, Timothy Hutton now).
Steven, the eldest Crain (Michiel Huisman now, Paxton Singleton then), took his family’s history and capitalized off of it to become a noted horror writer. His most famous work? It’s about that night at Hill House, which creates sizable friction among the siblings for the liberties he took. Older sister Shirley (a layered performance for both Elizabeth Reaser and Lulu Wilson in flashbacks) runs a funeral home with her husband and lives adjacent. Sister Theodora (Kate Siegel, Mckenna Grace as a child, both perfect for their roles) lives in Shirley’s guest house and works as a child therapist (and also has supernatural powers). Younger brother Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen in the present, aptly-named, aptly-cast Julian Hilliard in the past) takes to drugs to cope with his childhood trauma and is in and out of rehab facilities. None are particularly close.
The series follows each of these four siblings, along with Luke’s twin sister Nelle (Victoria Pedretti now, Violet McGraw then, both effective in showing the fear and innocence of the character), who drives the show’s narrative after a tragedy befalls her.
Flanagan weaves from past to present to past once more to draw out of a deep well who these characters are, what ails them and what they must do to find the balm they so desperately seek. Though this is a show about ghosts (quite literally, both the grim *and* grinning variety), dark hallways and a central horror that gets a lot of carnivorous comparisons, it’s also a show about the frailty and forge of the family in crisis. Flanagan and his writing team have a deft ear for writing characters who feel as much as they scare, which allows this series to transcend past a genre where the shocks are well-known.
The ensemble does exactly what Flanagan needs it to do. Specifically, Huisman goes past the traditional supernatural skeptic to pry at why his Steven ticks as he does, Gugino carries the weight of the past’s sinking ends in one of her best roles to date, both Thomas and Hutton give what could’ve been the stereotypical “flawed horror father” character a shade of wilted hope and remorse and, in perhaps the series’ best performance, Jackson-Cohen breathes a sorrow and heart into his older Luke that grounds the show emotionally and in maturity. His slice of the narrative, “The Twin Thing,” is the series’ richest, saddest and scariest installment, for reasons past haunts and ghosts.
Mental illness comes up aplenty here (the apologetic for Steven’s rationale for his family’s plight), and it’s a rather progressive take on what long has been a cheap, irresponsible straw man in horror. Rather than spook audiences into being afraid of it by trapping folks in mental hospitals or cutely flapping the diseases as coveralls for why bad guys do bad things, there’s an empathy and understanding for the horrors that are at play here that should be the new standard in how these ideas are treated in a genre meant to scare people.
Flanagan gets that, in and of itself, mental illness can be a bad, scary, damaging thing, but that those inflicted with it deserve utmost understanding and love, and can always overcome. He treats addiction the same way and casts a judgmental light on the siblings who dwindle in patience Luke’s attempt at sincere recovery. This is how you represent these ideas in visual media.
Now, the show does struggle a bit with that to-and-fro chronology, in its pacing and story development. Flanagan bit off a lot to chew here, and it stands to reason that the show might’ve been better off at a tighter eight-episode run (not every installment lands as it should). It’s also not going to exactly satiate those who want cheap jump scares 24/7, though the series’ main ghost, the Bent-Neck Lady, will creep your dreams for at least a night or two after the show’s over, as will the, well, haunting production design of Hill House. Would it have been nice to learn a little more about the history of the house and its haunted walls? Sure, though Flanagan gives you plenty extra elsewhere with the narrative.
It’s not really custom for a show about a haunted house and its terrified tenants to be one of the more moving pieces of television in a calendar year, but Flanagan makes it so. “The Haunting of Hill House” rewards those who aren’t afraid to confront their own ghosts, those bumps in the past that still linger, and head back to where it all began. It’s absolutely worth booking a room. [B+]