TV Review: The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

The Haunting of Hill House (2018) created by Mike Flanagan based on the novel by Shirley Jackson

The Crain family were house flippers, fixing up old, dilapidated homes and selling them for a profit. They were on the verge of retiring when they bought Hill House, the ancestral New England estate of the Hill family. Parents Hugh (Henry Thomas) and Olivia (Carla Gugino) bring their five children to the palatial mansion where they quickly settle in and get to work. But odd things start to happen, especially to the children. The parents explain away a lot of stuff as dreams or youthful imagination but viewers know there is more going on. The mom is especially vulnerable to the malign influences of the house. 

The reason viewers are clued in is because the story is told from two time periods. The first period is the family in the house. The second period is about twenty years later as the adult children are drawn back together from their separate paths as tragedy looms over them again. Oldest son Steven (Michiel Huisman) has made a writing career out of telling haunted house stories, starting with the family's experience at Hill House. He does not believe in the supernatural and is just making a buck off its popularity, much to the chagrin of his siblings. Oldest daughter Shirley (Elizabeth Reiser) has become a mortician and is just as much a control freak as she was as a child. Her sister Theo (Kate Seigel) lives in her guest house and works as a psychologist, though she has some psychic powers based on touching others, so Theo wears gloves all the time to avoid her issues with reality becoming worse. Twins Nell (Victoria Pedretti) and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) are pretty messed up. Luke is a drug addict who has a very hard time staying clean and winds up mooching off the rest of the family, often stealing from them. Nell is sweet but never quite over her experience, making her very unstable. The ghosts that haunted them in the house start showing up again, encouraging some very bad decisions that lead to a lot of drama.

The story is very exciting and thrilling. The scares are mostly non-gory and are the results of tense situations and the awful consequences of past and current decisions. The show slowly explains what happened at the house over the ten-episode arc, building tension as little details are revealed along the way. The contemporary story of family problems also slowly reveals their problems in a dramatically satisfying way.

The TV series is nominally based on the classic Shirley Jackson novel. A lot of the characters share names with those in the book though they are totally different in motivation and personality. The house is very similar (the creepy spiral staircase in the library and the weird statues). Some of the classic lines (like Mrs. Dudley's "we never come to the house in the night...in the dark") are retained. But the story is very different. There's not a group of psychic investigators who are in over their heads. Here is an unfortunate family who are in over their heads.

I enjoyed the series as a family drama and a spooky story. The filmmakers do a good job showing how damaged the family is by their experience and how they are forced to cope with a situation they tried to leave behind. The first nine episodes are great. Then the tenth episode tries to shift the focus and understanding of what's going on, as if it was a great plot twist. But it does not fit in with what happened in earlier episodes--the ending does not pay off the build up but instead sells it short. The family drama ends well (perhaps too well) and the spooky story is rendered completely ridiculous and incomprehensible. 

Slightly recommended--this is nine-tenths of a great show. Unfortunately the last tenth lets it down. If you can stop watching after the ninth episode and just leave the story unresolved (which would require supernatural effort), that would be for the best. If I could go back in time and tell myself not to watch the last episode, I would. My younger self probably wouldn't believe me and watch anyway.

I watched on Netflix but there is a DVD set available with additional footage. If my local library had it, I would borrow it to see the deleted scenes.

Dual/Duel Review: The Haunting (of Hill House)

Dual/Duel reviews are an online smackdown between two books, movies, games, podcasts, etc. etc. that I think are interesting to compare, contrast, and comment on. For a list of other dual/duel reviews, go here.

Just about every book made into a movie is better than that movie. The only exceptions that spring to mind are Jaws (the movie wisely drops the soap-opera-esque adultery subplot in the book) and Moby Dick (the movie doesn't bog down in cetacean biology or whaling techniques). Otherwise, you are better off reading the book. But what about The Haunting, the film version of Shirley Jackson's novel?

Growing up I saw The Haunting on television and it scared the pants off me. The movie was made by Robert Wise, director of The Sound of Music and West Side Story. It's a simple and effective chiller about a group of people who go to a house to investigate psychic disturbances there. The organizer of the group is Dr. Markway, who wants to write a paper about the phenomena. Luke Sanderson, who will inherit the house, comes to represent the family interest, though he seems more interested in having a good time. Dr. Markway invites several other people to come to the house. Only two accept. One is Eleanor, a fragile woman who has spent most of her life caring for her sick mother (now deceased). She wants to go since she has nothing in her life other than an annoying sister and brother-in-law who are completely unsupportive. She takes the car (which is half hers) and drives off to Hill House to meet the doctor. The story remains mostly from her perspective and we can tell she's already troubled before she even gets to the haunted house. Things go bump in the night and from bad to worse for her as the story goes on.

The movie is highly effective in that it does not rely on special effects other than mostly sound effects. In one great scene, Eleanor is in a bedroom with Theo, the other female in the group. A noise is out in the hall, coming closer, getting louder. It bashes on the door like a cannon ball, then gets quiet and whispery as whatever it is tries to get in. It's all worked out through sound effects and is a great scene that made me hide my eyes in fear. Even the third time watching it!

The movie stays very close to the plot of the book (though the doctor's name is Montague in the book--it doesn't seem like there's much reason for a change). The book goes much deeper into Eleanor's mind and shows how much the house gets under her skin. Presenting her perspective is much easier in a book than a movie, so naturally that's better. There's also more humor in the book which allows readers to have greater mood swings when the horrors happen. Getting that balance right (the humor and the horror) is pretty difficult and more humor might have sunk the movie. The book is better than the movie, but this particular pairing is very close. Both are highly recommended (though avoid the 1990's movie remake, which is truly terrible because of the dependance on visual effects in the place of psychological terror).

For some great commentary on the book, listen to A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast #71. Scott and Julie from the podcast are who inspired me to read the book, which I found at the local British library. Though they did say there's an edition with an introduction by Guillermo del Toro. I may search that out someday. The amazon link below is to that edition.

Winner: The Book



Loser: The Movie