Through the course of the past week, I took the ten hours to watch Netflix’s tv rendition of The Haunting of Hill House. It was inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel that came out in 1959. Now I have never read it before, but I do feel like they took plenty of liberties on adapting this story into the form that was put out by Netflix. The show tells the story of a family that moves into a mansion to flip it for a profit. While in the house they find out it is haunted. It manifests itself in many different forms for each person. A tragedy strikes causing the family to move away and separate. The second storyline is of the kids grown up, and when another tragedy strikes, they are drawn back together and have to face the house again. What really blows my mind is that the book is only 246 pages long, and Netflix ended up getting ten hours of content out of it, but what was most important was that the content was excellent. It was one of the best horror series or movie that I had seen in a while.
One of the best aspects to the show was their consistent ability to cause chills. Very rarely have I watched any thing where it actually produces goosebumps due to it being scary, but Hill House caused this to happen many times through out the series, even multiple times an episode, especially towards the beginning of the series. What they do to cause these chills was their placement of the ghosts and ghouls that appear in the background, which when watching in the basement in the dark makes the viewer feel like they also have a demonic figure behind them breathing down their neck, thus creating the chills on the arms and legs, and it occasionally even caused the spin tingled shiver that causes a slight shake or a small body twitch.
The background placements in Hill House were excellent throughout the whole show. The house has a ton of statues and large pieces of arts hanging in the background, so due to the ghosts appearing behind the family relatively often the background constantly drew my attention to the background, and I was trying to judge whether it was a piece of art, a statue or something that was about to scream and cause a jump, which this show was also excellent at creating. Not only did it create many chilling moments, they could often create jump scares and on two occasions, it was even enough for me to mutter an, “Oh God” due to me being so caught off guard. There was rarely a jump scare that did not hit.
Due to these two factors, they did better than many other horror shows or movies. This show many parallels to Stephen King’s It, which was recently recreated in a two-part movie. Both of these stories were told by an intertwining between the past and the present, it showed that the evil that haunted them as kids, and how that horror had followed them through their lives and eventually called them back home. Each person had their own side stories and specific fears that were shaped by their upbringing. Those are the parallels. Now I have read It and only read the summary for Hill House, so I know the potential that It had and failed to achieve. The source material was so rich and truly terrifying, and the second movie they turned the movie into a comedy more than anything. It did not hold up to any of the horror that it should have, and when they separated the characters and gave their back stories, it did not do it nearly as well as Hill House.
I believe that It would have been much better if it had been produced in this way where they could really break the story down into ten one hour increments than having a first movie that kind of follows the story and a second movie that tries to cram the majority of the story into three hours, it just did not work. Now to be fair, after reading the summary of Hill House, it was more of an inspiration toward the final product. The four main characters in the book, have similar names as those in the show, but they are not related in the book, and they took the history of the house like suicides, and they intertwined those into the family dynamic of the show, so they did not follow the source material, but they made a show so good that it does not take away from the final product. Like The Shining, the movie for The Shining is not the same as the book, but the premise it follows is very similar, and I enjoy both the book and the movie.
The show also addressed many of the tropes King includes in his novels, but that are excluded from his movies for the most part. In many of his stories addiction plays a big role in the story, but when the movies are being made, they seem to ignore it or make it a minor story line. In a symbolic way, it plays such an interesting role of the protagonists having to fight off their demons literally and figuratively. If he is renown as such a literary genius it should not be shrugged off, and Hill House embraced this element. Also, in many of King’s stories he wrestles with the idea of what the after life will be like. Now his ideas are usually more twisted and less hopeful than what people might hear preached in church, but it is such a natural human question that has been asked for years that gets washed over in his works as well. Again, Hill House embraces these elements and addresses them full on, there is not side stepping of the question.
So combining all of these elements together just makes this an excellent tv show to watch. It does not shy away from anything, and it provides great and consistent scares. There are even some episodes that have a certain who done it? feel that reminds me of Knives Out, specifically the episodes that are focused at the funeral home as they piece together a story. There is an abundance of lessons that future horror movies can take from this show from blending chills with jumps and embracing some common tropes that get left behind in other movies. I would give the show a 90 and strongly encourage a watch. It was not nightmare inducing, but at this point I feel like I have a high tolerance to horror, so watch at your own discretion. Also I know this one is long, but it was ten hours of show that drew many thoughts out of me.
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