The Haunting of Hill House Talks A Lot About Mental Illness, But Says Very Little
A ghost is a wish
Trigger warning: suicide, drug addiction rape and child abuse. Please proceed with caution.
Spoilers for the entire show.
In 2018, it is no longer enough to use mental illness as a barely-concealed euphemism for insanity in horror movies. The tropes of ‘psychiatric homes’ as haunted and terrifying places continue, of course, as does the portrayal of villains across all genres that fit neatly into identifiable symptoms (abrupt and sudden laughter, delusions, hallucinations, personality disorder…).
This day and age, there’s a new trend: including mental illness explicitly, especially to refer to characters who are seeing the supernatural but are perceived as ‘crazy’ by ignorant or in denial characters. This doesn’t actually do anything to fight stereotypes around mental illness or add to the plot itself, but it makes a story feel very politically and socially aware without doing much.
There is no better example of this than The Haunting Of Hill House, Netflix’s newest hit based on Shirley Jackson’s novel of the same name.
The events of the entire plot revolve around two focal points: the arrival at the unsettling Hill House and the unexplained, middle-of-the-night escape from it. In the night that the family ran away from Hill House, the mother — Olivia Crain — killed herself by jumping down a spiral staircase.
The story is structured around two chronological axes: their time at Hill House, and the present, when the children are now adults and their father is someone they rarely speak of, let alone speak with. As the protagonists of the show are (arguably) the children of the Crain couple, no explicit mention of mental illness is made in the past timeline, save some subtle hinting by Hugh to his wife that she might be, well, a bit ‘off’. However, the entire family breathes mental illness and psychology as adults.
Theo, the middle child, is a child psychologist. Nell, the youngest twin, sees a therapist and has been implied to have gone through several types of treatments and medication. Luke, the other twin, is a recurring drug addict who continues to crumble at rehabilitation. And no one talks about mental illness as much as their older sibling, Steven.
In every horror movie, there is always a realist: someone who insists on a logical explanation and refuses to believe in the supernatural. They are consistently framed as oblivious and in denial of the obvious, but it is the most natural response: humans try to be rational, and are terrified of the irrational, so we work our way around it. In The Haunting Of Hill House, Steven is that realist. He dismisses the theory of the house being haunted — he argues their family was. He is convinced that their entire family has a hereditary mental illness that causes them all to crumble and fall. First, their mother, when she took her own life in his childhood, and now, Nell, who recently killed herself.
“Our family has a disease that’s never been treated, because it was easier to listen to your crazy stories about an evil house. […] Oh, I know I’m never having children.
Because you think that they’ll just have the same imaginary sickness? They would. We all do.
Nell was delusional, depressed, Luke’s an addict, Shirley is a control freak, and Theo’s basically a clenched fist with hair. The whole fucking family is on the brink of a breakdown and seeing things that aren’t there, hearing things that aren’t there, and that shit happened after the house. It’s not the house. There’s something wrong with our goddamn brains.
So yeah, I’m never having children. I made sure. A vasectomy. Right out of college.”
- Steven Crain, Episode 8 of The Haunting Of Hill House, “Witness Marks”
Steven has chosen to direct his anger at his father, Hugh, for being unable to recognize and act on his mother’s mental illness when they were children, and for encouraging the other siblings’ ‘delusions’ about the house and its supernatural identity.
Hugh: She said the Bent-Neck Lady was back.
Steven: There it is. Mental illness.
Hugh: No, no, Steve
Steven: Clear as day.
Hugh: No, you don’t -
Steven: Hereditary. You let her believe all that bullshit.
Hugh:You don’t -
Steven: All that bullshit about Hill House and this is the inevitable conclusion, which makes you culpable.
- Episode 6 of The Haunting of Hill House, “Two Storms”
By now, it has been said dozens of times that Steven represents Denial, the first step in the Grief Process, and that his portrayal is of an asshole brother who sells out his siblings, cuts contact with the brother that needs him, and lives in luxury.
I disagree.
There are multiple scenes in The Haunting of Hill House that can be interpreted as the ghosts the children see being completely imaginary. Mostly, they just embody the frightened imagination of kids living in a creepy house in the middle of the woods. They disappear the moment an adult is near — when Luke goes down in the ‘kid-sized elevator’, the button to go up doesn’t work right up until the moment their parents scramble down, drawn to the scene by screams of terror.
Just like childhood fears, they fade in the light and come out at the fall of darkness, and can be vanished by a mother’s gentle kiss.
The audience is, of course, made to think that this is just awful coincidence, and a plot device so the parents don’t believe the children and stay in the house until it’s too late. Some might consider this disproven by the fact that both Luke and Nell see ghosts when they’re adults, but bear in mind that Nell sees a childhood terror, imagines her mom at her wedding, and sees her brother dying while dealing with the trauma of her husband’s death. Luke, on the other hand, sees a ghost from his childhood while he’s in recovery for heroin addiction. It is not hard to justify these as likely momentary hallucinations.
“You see what I’m talking about? I don’t understand why this family has such a hard time acknowledging mental illness. Mom, Nell, Dad’s talking to himself all night.”
- Steven Crain, Episode 6 of The Haunting of Hill House, “Two Storms”
What I’m saying, essentially, is that it would have been a much braver move on Mike Flanagan’s part if he chose to end the series by affirming that yes, in fact, the Crain family has a mental illness that has plagued them for decades because they have ignored it. It would have been brave to see mental illnesses that are less commonly represented (schizophrenia, paranoia disorder, etc.) be portrayed sympathetically on major television, especially on such likable characters.
It would have been less popular — who wants a ghost story without any ghosts, after all — but it would have been new and worthwhile. It is hard to believe that the family’s problems can be truly explained and solved away by seeing the apparition of their little sister and getting rid of their mother’s ghost. While the ending could be a metaphorical application for ‘letting go of our mother’, it still falls incredibly flat when you see the entire family figuring their lives out immediately after, as if recovery is that unspeakably easy. Even if the ghost angle is to stay, the writers choose to simply sweep under the rug any underlying issues which might linger.
It is very easy to have your family member, who’s a drug addict, miraculously recover from their drug addiction because the ‘spirits that haunted him’ are gone. It is not, in any imaginable way, easy to help a recovering drug addict deal with everything that has brought them here and what they’ve done once they did. In my opinion, as someone who has an uncle deeply afflicted by drug addiction, the final shot of Luke blowing out his ‘2 years sober’ cake is cheap, and it is misleading. The ending of The Haunting Of Hill House wants to tie a neat little bow around each one of the character’s main struggles, and doesn’t care if it destroys their complexity in the process.
Steven, wound so tight it hurts to look at and terrified of showing emotional vulnerability for fear of becoming ‘crazy’? Can have a child and get back with his wife, no problem (and let’s not talk about how that cheapens Leigh’s character, as well).
Shirley, controlling and resentful? Can suddenly talk to her husband because the ghost of her sister made her see how good that would be.
Theo, surrounded by emotional boundaries so high she can’t even look at the sky? Turned to stone by the thought of feeling something for someone, but also by the thought of not feeling anything at all? Has a steady girlfriend she’s moving in with.
“[…] And I felt nothing. Just nothing. And it spread, it spread everywhere in me, this nothing, until I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I was just this dark, empty black hole. And I tried to fill it up, I tried to fill me back up, and I called Trish and she came right away and I felt nothing. And then I tried to mourn at the wake and I felt nothing, and so I drank and I drank, and nothing worked. I couldn’t feel anything, Shirley. […]
And I’m just I’m just floating in this ocean of nothing, and I wonder if this is it, if this is what death is, just out there in the darkness, just darkness and numbness and alone, and I wondered if that’s what she felt and that’s what Mom feels, and it’s just numb and nothing and alone. What if that’s what it is for all of us when the time comes? And then the lights came on and there he was, and I didn’t see him. He was the light in the darkness. I reached for him because I had to feel something. And I didn’t see him. And he stopped me. He took my hands, and he said no, and then I saw him, and then you walked in.
God, I’m so glad I did it, though. Because it worked. Oh, God, it worked. I started feeling things again, and I felt I felt shame, and I felt grief, and I felt scared. I felt so fucking scared that I was gonna lose the only sister that I had left. And honestly, I had to do it, because it felt better than nothing. That thorough fucking shame was so much better than that horrible, empty nothing.”
- Theodora Crain, Episode 8 of The Haunting of Hill House, “Witness Marks”
(Someone who tells me this woman is emotionally stable and married two years after owes me a drink.)
Luke, after years of failing to recover and then watching a friend he thought had it all under control use him? He’s sober now, permanently.
Even if we don’t take into account the mental health problems caused by the ‘ghosts’ in the house, there are dozens of small things that are never properly looked at. While most of the children are angry at their father (for different reasons depending on what they think happened at the House), a common complaint from them is the fact that he stayed silent after an extremely traumatic event, never explaining what happened. Ghost or not, their mother killed herself during their early childhood, and they were ripped apart from a father they very clearly loved, to spend the time until their adulthood with their mother’s sister. Through all of this, they were completely in the dark about what had happened, confused and hurt and at the age where fantasies fly, imagining the worst by default.
During their time at the house, they found a literal dead body in their home, a man who walled himself up until he died and yet scratched his fingernails raw trying to exit. The parents do their best to shield them from it, of course, but it’s unimaginable to expect five kids to simply forget about the cadaver who was inside the walls. There are many other examples of events that, on their own, could be traumatizing, and altogether just bring about a horrifying stay at the House: Shirley’s beloved kittens dying gruesomely before her eyes, Luke’s friend being murdered by his own mother, Theo realizing her touch makes her vulnerable and learning to cover herself up, Steven watching his mother destroy his gift to her…
My point, though made in a roundabout way, is that ghosts or no ghosts, these children have been horrifically scarred. They have been exposed to death, loneliness and been denied answers for any of their questions. They have, as it’s often remarked, become national speculation. Their brother wrote a book that details the worst experience of their lives in detail, sparing no harsh word or sensitive topic. The Crain children have been hurt and then others have rejoiced in their suffering.
I find it impossible (and frankly, insulting) for the audience to believe that getting rid of ‘the ghosts’ can be enough to fix these people’s lives.
In a scene that managed to make me tear up, Theodora Crain lies on an old, battered couch in the basement where her patient (a little girl) is staying. Without any words being spoken, we see the actress whimper and shudder through what the viewer immediately recognizes as a simulated rape scene. Theodora feels, with her singular touch empathy powers, the exact moment when a man rapes the girl he is fostering.
Do they expect me to believe this woman can be okay in the near future? (Theo is going through some shit, okay?)
I’ve lived with ghosts since I was a kid.
Since before I knew they were even there.
Ghosts are guilt, ghosts are secrets, ghosts are regrets and failings.
But most times most times a ghost is a wish.
Like a marriage is a wish.
- Steven Crain, Episode 10 of The Haunting Of Hill House, “Silence Lay Steadily”
In the end, The Haunting of Hill House banks on its characters and family drama to differentiate itself from other ‘haunted house’ shows and horror movies. But when the moment comes, when they’re given the choice to actually confront all the issues they’ve implied, always on their tiptoes — the writers just turn the light on, and the ghosts disappear.
