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#Netflix house on haunted hill series#
This all ought to be enough to see The Haunting of Hill House climb to the top of my personal favourite list of scary stories but the real coup de grace of the series – even more than the effectiveness of its horror – is that the characters are always the focus of the series.
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There are more obvious ghost sightings, but Flanagan also peppers the screen with dozens of different ghosts that are usually only really noticeable if you’re looking out for them. Part of that has to do with just how scary the show is at times as Flanagan eschews cheap jump scares (well, aside for the one.) and gore for the sort of creepy, unnerving horror that comes from realising that a ghost has been standing at the corner of the frame the whole time never drawing attention to itself and not even acting maliciously but creating a real sense of "wrongness" that subsists long into the next scene and long after you’ve finished the episode. Part of that has to do with Flanagan’s virtuoso direction and immaculate plotting. The Haunting of Hill House is, in no uncertain terms, my single favourite horror story of all time. Each of these first five episodes builds on one another, Rashamon-style, for a mid-season climax around episodes five and six that not only pays off on the work done in the previous episodes but shifts the tone of the show from pathos-infused horror into something unspeakably heartbreaking. I can only promise that so inauspicious a start is necessary for the way the story and the characters blossom from there. It’s a somewhat risky move as the first episode is probably the worst of the ten and the Crain it focuses on, Steve is pretty easily the least likeable member of the Crain family. In particular, the first five episodes each focus on one of the Crain children – from oldest, Steve, to youngest, Nellie – and what starts off as a fairly straightforward-seeming haunted house story with fairly straightforward, almost stock characters expands into something infinitely more compelling. To say more than that would spoil one of the more intricately told pieces of storytelling I’ve come across in years but throughout the entire series, up until its rather contentious ending, pieces slowly fall into place as each episode sheds new light on events, both past and present, and on the characters themselves. Hill House destroyed the childhood of the Crain children, and it looks like it’s not done with them yet.
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Hugh and Olivia are clearly very much in love with one another and pass on that same sense of acceptance and love to their five children, who are – the odd sibling squabble aside – close enough to be happy to spend an entire summer in the company of only one another.Īs we flash between that past and a present that sees the Crains coming together once more for a funeral, we come to learn more and more about Hill House and the part it played in a tragedy that destroyed their familial bond and set them on the path to becoming the broken people they are in the present. The family in question are the Crains who, in the past, moved into the titular house for the summer, while parents, Hugh and Olivia, renovate the house in an attempt to sell it for a tidy sum by the time autumn comes around. While Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is simply a straightforward but extremely effective ghost story, Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House is something altogether more complex, deeper and far more affecting.Įven calling what Flanagan has done here a "reimagining" is a bit of a stretch as he has taken a few character names, some of the novel’s more quotable lines, and, roughly speaking, Hill House itself, and crafted an entirely new story that is less about a haunted house than it is about how childhood trauma can haunt a family even decades down the line. It has been out on Netflix for over a year by now, I believe, but between its shameful showing during last year’s awards season and that it seems little talked about outside of horror and fantasy fandoms, any attempt to shout out its praises to a wider audience can never be a bad thing.Īnd, make no mistake, this is a series that should have great appeal not just to horror fanboys but even to those who have little interest in voluntarily submitting themselves to creepy atmospheres and supernatural scares.
#Netflix house on haunted hill movie#
Considering how I’ve referenced it in virtually every horror movie review I’ve written in the past six months and now that we’re going to be reliant on streaming services for the foreseeable future, I can think of no better time to revisit Mike Flanagan’s sublime 10-part reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel, The Haunting of Hill House.