For my last passion post of my freshman year, I would like to veer away from my movie-focused analysis and talk about my favorite horror tv show/series: The Haunting of Hill House. 

The Haunting of Hill House is based of a 1959 novel written by Shirley Jackson. The tv show itself was released in 2018 and directed by Mike Flanagan.

 

Plot:

The show focuses on the Crain family: the mother Olivia (Carla Gugino), the father Hugh (Henry Thomas), and the five children, Steven (Michiel Huisman), Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser), Theodora (Kate Siegel), Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, and Eleanor (Victoria Pedretti).

Even though the show is only two seasons long, it is action packed and full of dark twists and turns. The Haunting of Hill House alternates between two different timelines: present day where we watch the five siblings who are still haunted by past paranormal experiences, and flashbacks displaying events from their childhood that lead up to the night in 1992 that changed their life.

The first season starts with a flashback of the Crain’s moving into the Hill House in the hopes to renovate and sell it, but things go downhill fast. Each person (besides Hugh and Steven for some unknown reason) in the family is haunted by a different entity and is affected differently, from the haunting experiences itself to the long-lasting effects. Here is an easy to follow list/summary of how each was haunted/effected:

Olivia: is affected the most; started having migraines, hallucinations, visions, and became just down-right crazy; haunted by a ghost named Polly Hill

Shirley: the second oldest child; found sick, half-dead kittens one day and despite her efforts to save them, all but one dies, causing her to hallucinate bugs crawling out of the dead bodies (dead kitten ghosts oooo).

Theodora (aka Theo): the middle child; gained a gift of “seeing/sensing things” just from touching them, which eventually causes her to see her mother’s bloody, rotting corpse.

Luke: youngest child/Eleanor’s twin; haunted by a tall man in a hat and a girl named Abigail (daughter of house caretaker/Luke’s friend, but she isn’t dead…yet)

Eleanor (aka Nellie): youngest child/Luke’s twin; most affected child; haunted by the “bent neck lady” who terrified her at every turn; still follows her into her adult life

Now let’s talk about “the night”. After spending a few days with her sister, unwell Olivia sneaks back into the Hill House and poisons Abigail (whoop there it is) after inviting her to a “tea party”. Hugh finds Olivia with Abigail’s dead body in a room referred to as the “Red Room” which has never been able to be opened until then. Hugh flees the house with the kids as disoriented Olivia tries to stop them. Once Olivia snaps out of her haunted daze, she is pushed down the stairs by Polly Hill and dies, forever stuck in the house.

Fast forward to present day: Steven writes a book about his family’s experience in the house, causing drama between his siblings. Steven is still in the first stage of grief, denial, and chalks up the idea of “ghosts” to genetic mental illness. This denial causes him to get a vasectomy (a secret he kept from his wife). Shirley owns a funeral home and has a family with two kids, while displaying the second stage of grief: anger. Theo became a child psychologist where she used her “gift”. She also uses drinking as a coping mechanism. Luke became a drug addict who is in and out of rehab. Nellie is still haunted by the bent neck lady and experiences sleep paralysis. She ends up marrying her therapist and he dies in front of her while she is paralyzed in a paralysis episode.

Once the initial introductions and backstories are given, the rest of the show follows each of the siblings as they live with their past trauma, along with their present demons, literally. After Nellie’s husband dies, she spirals into a dark mental state, which leads her back to the Hill House. Since her mother is trapped there, her ghost hands Nellie a rope, to which she hangs herself with. After the family reunited at her funeral, Luke attempts to burn Hill house (the house said “not today” and refused to burn) and instead gets attacked by the ghosts, who put a needle in his arm, almost causing him to overdose. In a rage of guilt, the rest of the family go to the house to save Luke and face their fears. Nellie, who was not corrupted by the house and the demons within, saves her family…to some extent. Olivia and the other ghosts trap the family until Hugh offers to stay in their place.

 

Analysis:

I know, I know, seems kind of boring when reading it, but hey, I have a word limit and I don’t want to bore you with every single detail.

Nellie’s story was the most interesting to me out of all the characters, as it poses a lot of unanswered questions. One of the most important details that I noticed within this show is that Nellie was haunted by “the bent neck lady”, but then ended up hanging herself, causing her neck to break (as depicted to the right, my apologies), so she becomes “the bent neck lady”. Was she seeing the future? What was the significance of this detail? Because it was her mother who gave her the rope, not “the bent neck lady” herself. Also, why were both her and her twin Luke the most affected out of the siblings? They are the youngest siblings and were only a few years old at the time of “the night”, so shouldn’t they not have really remembered it/not been as affected compared to their older siblings?

I love The Haunting of Hill House because every character has their own path and own story that is derived from the same traumatic experience. It is interesting to me that each person was affected in a different way; some becoming successful authors and psychologists, some becoming alcoholics/drug addicts, and some just dying all together. I love seeing the psychology behind shows and this one definitely has a lot of interesting concepts that someone who didn’t spend the past 3 years learning psychology (yes, I am calling myself a psychology nerd) would probably not notice.