THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE: HEART, SCARES, AND THE TRAUMA OF NOT BEING HEARD.

The experience of watching Netflix’s latest – an adaptation of Shirley jackson’s legendary Gothic horror classic The haunting of hill house –  beyond being a wonderful horror series that anchors itself in emotional pull just as much as it does terror – is also one of a fantastic exploration into the terrifying nature and experience of not being heard.  One I have directly experienced, and one many of and especially especially those of us who live within the margins have experienced first hand.  That fear and that terror that took up residence in my being over that very lonely couple of weeks some time ago,  where literally nothing I said mattered,  where no one listened, and because no one was listening,  that maybe it didn’t matter,  or that maybe I didn’t matter.  The blackness it descends one into,  the trauma that extends from that particular kind of invisibility,  the loss of hope,  and of confidence.  The residual damage that follows from person after person either gas lighting you, condescending to you,  or infantilizing you. This was the power of Hill House to me.   Repeatedly we are shown characters doing one or two or all three of these things to another in order to pacify them,  or to deny a truth they themselves don’t want to face. We see the subsequent effects of it,  the reopening of old wounds,  emotional lockdowns,  or breakdowns,  and ultimately the eventual loss in some cases. And we are reminded of our experiences and it’s both enraging and terrifying.

Using ghost and ghouls as avatars The Haunting of Hill House paints a very clear picture of the weight of shame,  guilt,  and the secrets and lies that spring forth from them as protections from facing what we fear most,  what on some level we don’t think we’re prepared to see,  or from disrupting what we think we know.  It’s a constant and oft repeated theme in the show from one siblings refusal to acknowledge another’s preternatural or supernatural abilities,  to another’s denial of the inciting incident of the entire series.  It’s in a pivotal sequence where one sibling hears but doesn’t listen to a young girl who tries to explain to her a horrifying secret which she misses because she’s too busy trying to explain it away instead of really listening.  The holes these things leave,  the continued abuse it might allow,  the harm it causes to the Crain family –  who are just as decrepit, in disrepair, and disintegrating every bit as much as the house they once occupied –  makes for maybe this shows most frequently disturbing images which is saying a lot because there is a plethora of terrifying and disturbing images in this show.

The Haunting of Hill House is not one of those shows or films that can be described as not particularly scary,  but packing a wallop when it comes to it’s intensity,  and suspense.  No…This is an old fashioned ghost story, the kind that puts your head on a swivel in the dark,  the kind that asks you to take a small break and allow your eyes to imbibe something flowery and light after, the kind where you’re sitting by the camp fire and a chill begins to sink into your bones, despite the fact that you are sitting next to fire.  Your fear so laser focused that the heat from it now boils your nerves, and the storyteller now instinctively realizing that your focus is now singularly narrow (and thus properly prepared)  that they can literally make any form of misdirection,  or movement and cause you the audience to pop and instantaneously move from out of your seat.  It’s a fear rooted in identifying and relating to these expertly drawn characters.  Seeing so much of ourselves within them that we begin to see their journey as our own.  So that when they are scared, we are scared,  and when they jump,  we jump.  This in particular is not atypical to the genre –  especially if it’s a well done member of the genre – what is atpical though, is the level of execution.  Whether on TV or film, as is the case in almost any genre, but especially ( I believe) in horror, there’s always some character who is not as well drawn as the others someone who seems two dimensional,  who is difficult to understand,  whose motivations may be paper thin.  For example, in hereditary (one of my favourite films of this year) Gabriel Byrne’s character I never quite figured out (which admittedly could just mean it flew over my head)  I understood his preliminary motivations sure, and to some small extent what drive his insipid silence,  but beyond that he seemed to be much less deep, much more superficial than Toni Collete’s beleaguered Annie Graham, or Alex Wolff’s moody Peter Graham,   and that household was just three members deep.  Hill house has no such issues. Every single member of the Crain family is so well drawn out,  so well defined, so crystal clear in both their conscious and unconscious motivations. that it hands this show a depth and weight I don’t know that i’ve really ever seen in the genre – especially again in a show that is this jam packed with actual frights and scares.   I don’t claim to be a horror expert, and while I’ve watched a lot of horror films, I don’t think of myself as necessarily academic in the field.   So I can’t claim the kind of confidence to make this feeling to be in stone, but out of the number of horror films that I have laid my eyes upon, (Which is quite a number)  this is unlike any other.

Flanagan and the writers have really kind of set the bar for the genre, especially as it pertains to TV and long form television in particular.  Through these family members, and their stories – each told with a level of understanding into not only what motivates,  and drives them, but a gift or unique skill for storytelling even amongst actors by actors like Gugino, Hutton, Gish, and Siegel, – we explore trauma and memories and the way they shift and distort our perspective.  Twisting and gnarling it so. that we can’t even see even what is directly in front of our eyes.  It’s a show that finds heart in horror,  terror to make us lose heart, and horror to find heart again.  A masterpiece of television now on Netflix.

On October 12th, you're expected. The Haunting of Hill House is a modern reimagining of the iconic novel, about 5 siblings who grew up in the most famous haunted house in America.