100 Favorite Shows: #19 — The Haunting of Hill House
“It’s full of precious, precious things and they don’t all belong to you.”
[Disclaimer: In March 2020, Sera Johnston accused Timothy Hutton, the star of The Haunting of Hill House, of raping her when she was fourteen years old. Hutton has since denied the allegations. This was reported by Buzzfeed News.]
Based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name (but hardly relating much to the source material at all), The Haunting of Hill House is not only one of the best Netflix original series; it’s one of the best horror television series of all-time. Mike Flanagan’s adaptation evolved into anthology series going forward (first with last fall’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, too new to earn consideration on the list), but the first season was a masterpiece all its own. Centered around the Crain family and moving during two different timelines (in 1992 with the Crain children in their youth and in 2018 with them in adulthood), The Haunting of Hill House became more than a scare machine for Halloween season in 2018; it mixed the best of the horror genre with the best of a prestige family drama.
(There are spoilers for The Haunting of Hill House in this essay. If you’ve read the book, there are still spoilers, as the two are quite different.)
In The Haunting of Hill House, it’s not only the characters who exist across time. It’s their fears, their flaws, their traumas. We only see the Crain family from 1992 onward, but it’s clear that familial trauma did not begin in the decade of Beastie Boys, Seinfeld, and disposable cameras. It’s something that’s been embedded within generations of the Crains (or, at least, in terms of the sensitivity-based abilities present within the women of the family). When these uneasy family streaks compound with the haunting, manipulative phantoms of Hill House, it spells doom for the current iteration of the Crain family.
The Crains fled Hill House in 1992 after their family was torn asunder by what appeared to be their matriarch’s (Carla Gugino as Olivia Crain) suicide. The uncertainty regarding what happened to their mother is a clear source of pain for the Crain children. Yet, the trauma and repression comes when she returned to Hill House on “that night” to poison the child of the caretakers, the Dudleys (Annabeth Gish and Robert Longstreet), Abigail (Olive Elise Abercrombie), with rat poison-infused tea. She very nearly did the same for her own twins, Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen in the present and Julian Hilliard in the past) and Nell (Victoria Pedretti and Violet McGraw), as a means of “saving them” from lives of addiction and depression, respectively. It’s a horrible notion grounded in lunacy, but it’s one spurred on by the house itself and the ghosts within it, namely Poppy Hill (Catherine Parker), a truly disturbing flapper ghost.
When it comes to haunted houses and inherited trauma, though, it’s not nearly so simple as “the ghost made me do it.” In the show’s miraculous sixth episode, “Two Storms,” Luke looks over the coffin of his twin sister, Nell, and finally unpacks the supernatural events of yore with his father, Hugh (Timothy Hutton and Henry Thomas). The two share a moment together after Hugh finally revealed his true belief that Olivia did not kill herself, but rather that Hill House had caused it. Eldest brother Steven (Michiel Huisman and Paxton Singleton) rebukes Hugh’s theory with vitriol, but Luke hangs back. It’s not just that he believes his father, but that, on some level, he’s always known.
They know Olivia didn’t kill herself. (In reality, Olivia did take the final step of her suicide all on her own, but the corruption to get to that point left few shards of her original personality behind. The camera at the climax of “Screaming Meemies” is careful to show Olivia falling of her own accord; Poppy doesn’t push her as Olivia did to Nell.) They also know no Crain put buttons on Nell’s embalmed corpse and they know the truth behind “The Bent-Neck Lady.” While the other siblings rage about mental illness, Luke drifts slowly into the camp of the supernatural, the trauma of Abigail’s death and his own near-murder still with him after all these years. For Nell, the Bent-Neck Lady was never just another ghost.
The Bent-Neck Lady is the specter that haunts Nell throughout her life in bouts of sleep paralysis as the harbinger of death and destruction that causes adult Nell to worry for Luke when the BNL (not the Barenaked Ladies) shows up once again. However, “The Bent-Neck Lady” is also the name of the series’ fifth episode (and one of its best).
Each of the first five episodes of The Haunting of Hill House focuses on one of the Crain children and up until “The Bent-Neck Lady,” Nell was portrayed as a blank slate type of character. It seemed like there was more interest to be had in the controlling, career-confident Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser and Lulu Wilson) or the self-isolated, fearful-of-feeling, “Touch me” Theo (Kate Siegel and Mckenna Grace, the most magnetic of the child actors) until Nell finally got seventy incredible minutes to herself.
As much as “The Bent-Neck Lady” is about Nell, it’s also about the figure known as The Bent-Neck Lady. The tragedy of this, of course, is that Nell is The BNL, an ever-present vision of her own doom. In most haunted house stories, the tenants are forced to endure eternal haunting from ghosts who are no more independent than their victims. Nell and The BNL, however, are trapped within themselves. They are caught in an inescapable loop. For Nell’s entire life, she witnesses her own suicide, which is vastly more terrifying than any spooky ghost could be. Of course, though, the question must be asked: Who’s to say Nell’s suicide was any more self-inflicted than Olivia’s?
If you ask Steve, he’d tell you his sister and mother killed themselves. For all of Luke’s psychological damage, Steve puts on the delusional airs of being “the responsible one.” (Has any television series ever had two responsible brothers? Michael and Gob, Jimmy and Chuck, Steve and Luke. Granted, it’s a challenge to see any of these men as responsible.) When it’s time for him to grieve the death of Nell, he shoulders the loss by viewing the funeral as a cause for reunion over a cause for tears. As the oldest child, he was raised to be the one in charge when Hugh and Olivia were away from their kids. It forced him to grow up faster and to believe that if he was strong, then his siblings would be, too. However, it also caused him to become the family’s non-believer. (The only spectral presence he sees is Hugh, whom he believes is conjuring up ghost stories just for the sake of it.) His arc to understanding his own remorse and regrets is one of the crucial tethers to the end of the series. It also serves as one of the series’ most chilling revelations, as it’s unveiled that Steven saw a ghost long before he witnessed an apparition of Nell in his apartment after the first episode. It’s the harmless, impossible-to-distinguish ghost who fixes a clock on the staircase of Hill House. Steve passes by him without a second thought and Hugh’s admission of this is as terrifying as the thought that Luke’s treehouse isn’t real either.
If you ask Luke and Hugh, they’d tell you that Hill House killed Nell, just like it killed Olivia. (One subtle moment in “Two Storms” sees Luke hold onto the knowledge that Nell’s neck was broken, grasping the larger implications of that cause of death.) And unless I missed something pivotal, Nell’s eventual downfall begins when Olivia promises her the family locket when she’s older. It’s not just foreshadowing of materials wrapping around Nell’s neck, though. The locket also symbolizes the trauma that is passed down from mother to daughter.
Nell was the kindest of the Crain family. Like Beth March in Little Women, she was the best of them. (Like Beth, her death fractures the family. They may be together, but they’ll never be whole again. Family bonding doesn’t take the future into account.) When she’s compelled to return to Hill House as foreboding music cascades over the dread, she calls Hugh to warn him about the BNL’s return. As one of the Crain believers, Hugh recognizes the danger and implores Nell to seek Steve’s help. All she can reply with is, “Sorry to wake you.” That is her nature. She apologizes, she writes letters about her siblings and never about herself, she refers to Santa as “Mr. Claus,” and she believes her familial love is indivisible (not invisible). (Child Nell is fearless in the face of Steve posing as a bear. The BNL is all she ever feared. Perhaps because the BNL came to her when Nell was alone and helpless and when she faced the “bear,” she was paired with Luke. Indivisible.) That’s what makes Nell the most tragic figure on the show. She’s the best of them and, as a result, she’s the most easily preyed upon.
The fallout of Nell’s “suicide” threatens to tear the Crains apart. Shirley intuits betrayal from her husband, Kevin (Anthony Ruivivar), who becomes “a waiter,” according to Theo during his time of grief. (She’s actually projecting her own relationship-based guilt onto him.) Steve screams at Hugh. Theo falls down in a drunken stupor and reaches for Kevin in a moment of weakness. (Theo wouldn’t sleep with Kevin because she’s not a bad sister, she’s a lesbian, and she just wanted to feel something besides the nothing she felt when she touched Nell’s corpse.) It all transpires in the foreground of the “Two Storms” episode (brilliantly directed by Flanagan, as they all were) with Nell laying in her coffin in the background of practically every present-day scene.
“Two Storms” is a tracking-shot episode that is far from a gimmick. It pulls off the parallelism of the two timelines better than any of the other episodes (this is saying a lot because Flanagan has a key eye for objects that can be used to transition from past to future) and it remains one of the all-time greatest feats I’ve ever seen on the small screen. (By small screen, I mean my laptop’s screen. How could I ever bear to watch a show this affecting on the big screen? I wouldn’t be able to turn my back at night.) Half of the episode takes place during Nell’s funeral in the present day and the other half during a night at Hill House years ago when a chandelier fell in the living room. The most breathtaking illustration of how the trauma of the past affects the present comes when Hugh (having just been so floored by seeing all his children together that he viewed them as children first) searches for the bathroom and turns directly into a hallway of Hill House, bringing us all back to 1992. It’s as if the loss of Nell was enough to bring him back to his traumatic summer. Or even just the patter of the rain, suggesting that every time a store arises, he returns to the house that doomed his family.
Throughout the installment, there are myriad recurring paradigms. The family (or what’s left of them) unites to comfort each other. Thunder rages outside, tempers and fears rage inside. Nell’s coffin tips over and Steve lifts it back up with Luke, just like he lifted the chandelier with Hugh 26 years prior (Shirley is sure to protect Nell’s neck, despite not being a member of the Wu-Tang Clan). Even the power goes out in both timelines. But who’s the one who brings back the light every time? Nell.
Pause the screen a couple times (if you can bear it) during “Two Storms” and you’ll see Nell/BNL watching over the Crain family’s discussions. (Throughout the series, she’s probably the most obvious of the “background ghosts.”) She’s doomed to be a haunting figure for eternity, but it’s not in Nell’s nature to use this for anything except good. Throughout her own funeral, she does whatever she can to keep the Crains together, especially after Shirley threatens to kick them all out.
Child Nell beseeches her family members, “Why couldn’t you see me?” when the light finally returns on that stormy, long-ago night. It’s played like a question and a cry for help. But when no one can see the BNL, Nell’s done wondering why. Instead, she’s causing a commotion and knocking out the power to force the Crains to come together and help one another. It’s heartbreaking, but inspiring and a testament to how the show’s storytellers wrote through every family trauma and every perceived act of suicide (whether through hanging or drug addiction) with the utmost empathy. (I remain awed by the family’s accusatory dialogue surrounding the warning signs of Nell (her phone calls, her confrontations, her enabling behavior). None of them had ever noticed them before, but they speak about them like there’s a chance to bring her back.)
Ultimately, though, one of the show’s enduring lessons is that there’s sometimes not a damn thing to be done. Would the BNL have ever rested until Nell returned to Hill House (the wall read, “Come home, Nell” at one point before more wallpaper was removed to reveal, “Welcome home, Nell”)? Her psychology and her tethers to Olivia (“puffalopes,” a game of counting the time between thunder claps, the aforementioned locket) and Hill House doomed her before she ever had a chance at normalcy. Her time with her true love, Arthur (Jordane Christie), was briefer than her time with Olivia. Even when she waltzes with him in Hill House, she’s more alone than any of the ballroom dancers from The Haunted Mansion. Passing and dancing alone through the statues en route to a “The Forest Again” in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows-esque tragic death party with the ghosts of a happy family, it’s gutting to watch Nell, helplessly spinning into eternity. No matter what, Hill House was hellbent on getting its way.
Like many classic horror tropes (think Derry in It or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining), Hill House holds the traumas of many families — not just the Crains — within its walls. Despite the best efforts of the Crain children, trauma can’t just be burned down. Though, it’s not for lack of trying as Luke, Steve, Shirley, and Theo all do their darndest to erase the memory of the home from within its own stomach, the Red Room, at the end of their respective journeys in the series.
As detailed above, each of the first five episodes are dedicated to each character’s individual personalities before eventually bringing them together for the explosive “Two Storms.” Steve is burdened by responsibility and Luke by addiction, we know that. But Shirley and Theo are just as flawed.
Shirley, wracked by guilt over her personal affairs, is perpetually pushing herself towards a lack of feeling. She is a very matter-of-fact kind of person who is effectively characterized through her outward dismissal of Theo’s grief and glove-wearing habits, her compulsive need to change every light bulb in her home/funeral parlor, and her emotionless ability to embalm her own sister. Granted, it makes for a practical use of Shirley’s character capacities, but the thought of it is still morbid, especially when considering the state of Nell’s body after the hanging. Ultimately, Shirley’s breakthrough arises when she finally admits to herself that she can never be a perfect person.
Shirley’s grief differs from Theo’s. Theodora, ever “sensitive” to spectral spirits, quells the immensity of her feeling by drinking (rather than punching) and refusing to actually connect with any of her siblings in the same way she once connected with her mother. Instead, she sees them as people to be defended and people to be angry with, but never people to feel whole through. It is this forced detachment that results in Theo collapsing psychologically when family grief is thrust upon her. When these notions are eventually outweighed by the enormity of mortality and all of its accompanying terrors, Theo breaks down in a roadside patch of grass (following the most well-executed jump scare in horror history) and admits to Shirley that she feels more than all of her siblings combined.
While Hugh (who talks to himself throughout the funeral (or perhaps to Olivia’s spirit)) is clearly a traumatized husk since Hill House ruined everything in 1992, it’s Luke whose grief is the hardest to watch throughout the end of Nell’s arc. He can hardly bear seeing her body in the coffin and for those of us who were not related to Nell, Jackson-Cohen’s apprehension and frustration does an amazing job of framing the funeral through the lens of the survivors. (Not to mention, Luke is also burdened by his siblings flaunting their drinking habits around his ninety-day sobriety streak. He also has run-ins with the most terrifying ghost of Hill House, the Tall Man, who glides, stares, and seeks his hat.) How impossible it must have been to see the purest sibling laid to rest when they all felt themselves to be worthier of a coffin.
Their grief syncs up with many of their most pronounced hurdles. The Red Room takes on different forms (in a boggart/The Good Place Judge-type personality-matched test for characters to overcome) for each character to conquer. (A single window signifies it also contained them, whether it was a treehouse or a dance room or a tea room.) It nearly destroys them. The characters are pushed to the brink, but ultimately, Nell was the only sibling taken by Hill House. A celebration of Luke’s sobriety might be the closest thing to a happy ending for the Crains we could have hoped for.
Hugh doesn’t quite get the happy ending, though. Maybe, after Olivia died and he fled, he never wanted one. Either way, he ends up occupying the role in Hill House after his death that is akin to the role Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner fills in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. He sacrifices himself to become an eternal member of Hill House so that those he loves may live freely. In a way, the spirits of Hill House (including the Dudley family) are able to live their eternity freely, too, now that Hill House has been designated as a specter sanctuary, rather than just any old mansion for tenants to come and go. The afterlife might not be such an undesirable place to be, even if it’s not ideal. It’s a place for unhappy haunts.
Tragically, Nell is forced to be a part of this forever home. Olivia seems long gone from the one who once told the family, “Go on without me.” Hugh is hardly the man who saw black mold as the reason for his family’s uptick in nightmares and throat clutching. But Nell was not someone who wanted to spend eternity as a ghost. She’s clearly not well, but she also could have had so much more in her life if she hadn’t been marked from a very young age.
Instead of committing to the terrors and anxieties plagued upon the ghosts by Hill House, though, Nell remains herself — a beacon in the dark. Just as she saved her own pre-funeral gathering from being broken up by Kevin’s revelation that he took the royalties from Steven’s Hill/Hell House tell-all book (of which he was awake for very little, as one of the series’ clever doorknob perspective scenes shows us), she saves each of her four siblings from being digested by the Red Room. (Some argued that this “happy” ending (it’s hardly that) betrayed the horror narrative of The Haunting of Hill House, but I loved that Flanagan committed to telling a horror story like television had never seen before.) She’s the one tapping them out of Poppy’s alternate futures and she’s the one warning Luke from sitting down at the poisonous tea party hosted by Olivia. Likewise, when the four are stuck within the room they never thought they’d been granted admission to before, it’s Nell who brings them back to reality, saves their brother, and assuages their worst concerns about being the shittiest kinds of people alive.
Nell doesn’t manipulate them as some sort of warped form of punishment for not answering her desperate calls for help. She tells them exactly what they need to hear because it’s what she truly feels. Her last conversation with Theo wasn’t filled with anger because she’s clearly conversing with Theo now, for example. This isn’t a goodbye with Nell (it’s the first time we see all five siblings grown-up and interacting with one another with actual dialogue) because time doesn’t work that way. For Nell, it’s like rain or snow or confetti. While this might be the supernatural way of looking at the rules of time, it’s also mortally true for the other four Crain kids. Nell may be gone, but the impact she had on their lives is carried with them forever, sprinkled across their lives. Just like confetti.
This haunting was part of what I loved so deeply about The Haunting of Hill House that allowed a 2018 anthology series with only one arc so far to rise so highly on the list. Yes, I loved the blend of horror with family drama and the incredible acting (the children were all great across the board, but Pedretti’s performance was obviously my favorite) and the palpable empathy infused into every Flanagan work. But I also loved that it wasn’t afraid to be a ghost story.
The psychological complexity and the inherited family trauma were key factors in The Haunting of Hill House and the story could not have been told without them. However, it still allowed for the story to be supernatural. The phantoms were real, even if the trauma was more pressing. The Bent-Neck Lady made me reconsider my own nightmares and it did give me a scream before it ever even occurred to me to cry for poor Nell. It was a different kind of chilling.
This was not the Lonesome Ghosts kind of haunting story, even if that title would’ve aptly applied to the spirits within Hill House. Yes, there were ghosts, but they were also personally manifested and tailored directly to what each of the Crain children felt they could never overcome (and for some, they couldn’t). The scares were key and Flanagan ensured that the series was grounded in its horrors. But it was always more complex than just scares or thrills or the potential for gross-out terror. It was the story of a family that was irrevocably fractured, but still strong enough to comfort each other in the face of fallen chandeliers and fallen siblings. To be there for each other in shared trauma and to recognize their experiences as a source of unity, rather than an argument for division. In some cases, they realized it too late. In others, they may never realize the full gravity. But the collective strength of the Crains could never be as transient as the walls of Hill House. Not when Hill House is capable of making the fear of a gliding, eleven foot tall ghost man gazing directly into your cheek peanuts compared to the fear of carrying on for the rest of your life without the person who mattered most.
