Unpacking the Trauma in “The Haunting of Hill House”

*Warning — there are spoilers for the series The Haunting of Hill House in this article.*

What happens after enduring unspeakable terror is the same as what happens when you endure an unspeakable anything — you go on. You might not go on functionally, but you do the work of trying to stay alive. — Aurora Stewart de Peña

On the surface, Flanagan’s version of The Haunting of Hill House is a classic horror story full of ghosts and scares. But the true power of the show lies not with the ghosts, but with the internal hauntings of the Crain family.

What Flanagan does with the Crain family is something we don’t often see in television or movies very often — a true representation of how generational trauma, mental illness, and grief transform us. We see the manifestations of each family member’s trauma embedded in their personality and their life choices.

It’s telling that even though the central trauma is the same for all the siblings, (the haunted house, the death of their beloved mother and not knowing how she died, the feeling of abandonment from their father, just to name a few) they each internalize it in different ways.

The oldest sibling, Steven, is adamant that their experiences at Hill House were not hauntings but rather side effects of mental…