The Haunting of Hill House Gets One Important Thing About Ghosts Right

There are two truths that can only be learned by growing up in a haunted house. First, you may never fully realize how paranormal your world was until you leave it, as I learned at age 16 when my family moved out of the house I grew up in. Besides being inconvenient and a bit noisy, it’s a sad affair.

There are several TV show And horror movies which describe the experience better than The Haunting of Hill House. Hill House knows that ghosts are more than just scary devices and pale faces in reflected surfaces. These are the people left behind, with unknown names and untold stories. Ghosts are about death, grief and time – everything that makes up a ghost.

The ghosts of Hill House are stricken with death. He is also obsessed with grief, as portrayed by the Crane children, who represent the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Grief is dictated by time and how it changes people after a traumatic event.

That’s why Mike Flanagan A melancholy masterpiece, one of the saddest horror stories ever written. I rewatch it every Halloween, and every time I do, I’m reminded of things that Hill House does better than any of its ghoulish counterparts.

The history of my house and the history of Hill House

Netflix

The Haunting of Hill House is a good ghost story. It’s scary, almost impossible, and fantastic enough to be cinematic. My own ghost stories are usually served as a side dish to traditionally spookier Halloween entrées because they aren’t always that creepy.

These are stories of mild paranoia, doubt and acceptance of strange everyday phenomena. These are stories about a strange woman who stood at the end of the upstairs hallway and watched my mother put on her makeup. About the invisible figure that walked around my bedroom until one night I asked it, “Please be quiet.” This is the story of our playroom ghost, which I still haven’t figured out how to talk about.

The biggest lie ever told in a horror movie was that ghosts were the creators of terror. Hill House uses the spirits to its advantage, creating classic, effective jump scares and loud scares. But above all, he knows that there is nothing more tragic than ghosts or the people who experience them.

The Crane siblings react differently to the legendary Hill House, growing up under varying degrees of denial, repression and doubt. But they are all deeply damaged, not because of their fear, but because of what that fear did to them. They are their own worst enemies, and are only truly haunted by their own past, not by the ghosts that lived within it.

“Nobody could see me.”

Netflix

“I was here…no one could see me,” is what young Nell Crane tells her family when she seemingly disappears during a raging storm in episode 6. Haunted throughout her life by the terrifying “Crooked-Neck Lady”, Nell’s tragic story comes to us. ended with the discovery that she – the ghost of her childhood, reliving her past after jumping off the library stairs.

It’s one of the most tragic twists in the horror genre and one that you’ll struggle to connect with emotionally. There are few ghosts in this genre that exist outside of their original habitat, as they are usually exorcised in some action-packed ritual or defeated by some religious deus ex machina.

But not at Hill House. Nell’s afterlife has no resolution. She is doomed to exist forever in this house along with the others. Our only reprieve from her fate and the crushing weight of loss is the final episode, in which she bids farewell to her siblings, telling them that she loves them and that nothing else matters—a dignity rarely accorded to other spirits on screen.

– In any case, be kind.

Netflix

In Hill House, the living and the dead are equally tragic. Life and the afterlife are on equal terms when it comes to pain and suffering, and no one gets off easy. Yes, the remaining Crane siblings get a chance to start over at the end, but it comes at a cost.

Not a moment goes by in the series without the viewer being confronted with the torment of the Crains in any timeline. Whether it’s Luke’s empty hopelessness during his drug addiction years or his naive innocence as a child, we know he’s destined to be afraid. There is also Theo’s mysterious “gift”, which causes her confusion in her youth and emotional torture in her adulthood.

Nell’s shaking fear and sleep paralysis leave her unable to breathe; Shirley’s anger and responsibility weigh on her, as does Stephen’s seething desperation to deny, deny, deny.

Then there are ghosts. There are so many of them that it has since become an obsession to discover one of the many hidden Mike Flanagan figures scattered throughout the series. They are so common that it is easy to forget how terrible this reality is. How many spirits can a house inhabit before it becomes a cemetery? Where else can they go? Is there room for us? To go?

“Whatever was going on, it was going on alone.”

Netflix

The sadness of Hill House becomes even more apparent as the Crane children grow older, with their fear taking precedence over other problems and the ghosts themselves not seeming to be all that problematic (at least for a while). That’s because Flanagan knows what most other horror stories forget: ghosts are only scary for a moment—what they represent is much more unshakable.

When I think about my own ghost stories and the ones I’ve shared with others in my home, it occurs to me that no one ever mentioned being afraid. In fact, we were only able to recognize the “ghosts” after we left, because only then did we realize that it was real.

Even when I was alone in the house, I always felt that there was someone next to me. It was only after we moved into a decidedly “entity-free” house that I fully realized that the atmosphere I had experienced, while not particularly frightening, was not normal.

In the final episode of Hill House, Stephen, shaken by years of rationalism and resistance, finally realizes that he has, in fact, witnessed a ghost. It was harmless: the man repairing the watch was only seen in passing. It was only when his father Hugh revealed that he had never hired anyone to fix a watch that Stephen realized what he had experienced and, more importantly, that it was true.

That’s what Hill House is. We’re not talking about scares, one-take sequences, or even the most perfect cast ever put on screen. It’s about leaving people behind. It’s about letting the things that haunt you go.

Hill House is the only horror show I watch every year because, ultimately, it’s the only horror show that understands – as Stephen says – that in most cases the ghost is a wish. If you’re looking for more creepy content, check out our selection Terror-Tober schedule or check out our listings best zombie movies ever created and best horror games.