Matt Armitage
The Haunting of Hill House
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.
In a change of pace so extreme we’re all likely to get whiplash, we move from the comedy horror of Buffy to whatever the hell Hill House is. Supernatural horror sounds such a reductive way to describe this masterpiece from Mike Flanagan—who has become one of my favourite horror storytellers in the last decade—but it touches on so much more than simply being a ghost story.
Flanagan takes the essence of Shirley Jackson’s renowned and much adapted novel, and whilst he does add a lot more obvious visual horror to the story—this is TV after all—it never feels to go overboard and in fact is a finely-tuned balance of psychological horror and drama. There is plenty here for horror fans who are just here for the fear, but what propels Hill House beyond being just watchable horror television is the focus on the Crain family: their particular personalities, their strengths and weaknesses, and their complicated relationships with one another. A recurring motif of Flanagan is to explore grief, and the trauma that comes from it. How grief affects us, and our relationships with those around us.
Additionally, Hill House is, unlike most TV, guarded at revealing its secrets. Just as the Crain children don’t discover the real story behind their mother’s death until the end of the story, neither do we. Through dual timelines we learn about the family and their own particular secrets gradually until we’ve come to know them intimately, and despite (perhaps because of) their flaws, grown to care about them. This slow unfolding forces us into their perspectives, which somehow focuses the tension and fear we feel. We feel it as they do. We’re with them as they witness their mother’s gradual decline into insanity and feel more closely the effect living under that shadow has on the children, who become the damaged adults who return to Hill House following another traumatic event.
Hill House is possibly the best horror show ever made for TV. The episode “Two Storms” is nothing short of genius, sitting as it does in the middle of the story, and appearing like a lull, but in fact being the lynchpin of the whole season. I could go on, but this is a list not an ode to one show. OK, it’s not something you’re going to want to slap on an episode to rewatch like you might with Buffy. This is something different. Something to cherish.
