Living Room Bijou: The Haunting of Hill House, 2018

[BEWARE SPOILERS!]

With the end of The Haunting of Hill House, the new Netflix series, in sight, my wife said to me, “You know what? I bet they’ve been trapped inside the house all along. Their whole lives have been a dream created by the house.”

It would have been a good bet, a fine bet. If only she were right. Because until it collapses in the final episode, Hill House looks like it’s on its way to being a really good, if not great, horror series.

It had some big shrouds to fill. The first was Shirley Jackson’s classic 1959 novel. Then came the still-peerless, 1963 film The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Harris, giving her all in a performance that improves with every viewing. The film ranks high on lists of great supernatural films, including mine.

The series, conceived and directed by Mike Flanagan, re-imagines the story in ambitious fashion while striving to remain true to the spirit of the originals. It expands in both place and time while breaking down and rebuilding its main characters, creating a ghostly family saga. Like all prestige series, it’s a novelistic sprawl that also owes a lot to such classic horror novels as Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.

Instead of the lonely, high-strung, ultra-sensitive, Eleanor “Nell” Vance, we’re presented with a whole family of Eleanors, headed by Hugh and Olivia Crain and their five children: Steven, Shirley, Theo, Luke and Nell. (Fans of the original know the names.

Hugh and Olivia are house flippers. As shown in flashbacks, they purchased Hill House in 1992, planning to move in with their children, remodel it and then sell it and build their “forever house” with the profits. But the project goes terribly wrong: Olivia dies mysteriously and the rest of the family flees in terror (“in the night . . . in the dark” to quote a classic line).

The resulting trauma scatters the surviving Crains across the country, leaving them estranged, broken, vulnerable. Then, twenty-six years later, Nell, the youngest, returns to Hill House, where she too dies. Her death reunites the Crains once again, forcing them to relive and confront the terrors of that night long ago.

Hill House creeps and shudders with promise. It slowly conjures a sense of incident, character and place as it weaves back and forth in time (though sometimes it loses it place.) There are also small pleasures, such as a brief appearance by Russ Tamblyn, the last surviving cast member of the 1963 film.

There are several unnerving moments, some good jolts and, occasionally, that poetic unease that marks the best ghost stories, where the floor on which we all stand crumbles under our feet and reality turns unreal. Impossible things happen and we’re left mute and alone, our poor words no match for the horrors we’ve experienced. The show offers little nuggets of insight into the multiple meanings that lurk behind this most literary of horror’s subgenres. Ghost stories are devilishly hard to get right, but Hill House shows great flashes of promise.

Of the ten episodes, episode five stands out. Set mostly in one location, Shirley Crain’s funeral home, the direction, staging and dialogue reminded me of a chamber drama (or “ghost play”) by Eugene O’Neill or Edward Albee(particularly Tiny Alice,A Delicate Balanceor Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Both playwrights knew a thing or two about hauntings.

The funeral parlor is a stark barren blue-gray box, cut off from the world with the Crain family the souls lost in its emptiness, talking and raging at one another but unable to connect. The episode ends on a note of superb horror as we learn what’s behind the apparition known as the Bent-Neck Lady, a revelation cruel and disturbing.

But with all its virtues, in details large and small, there’s a sense of things coming up short.

For one, the opening voice over, taken directly from the novel’s unbeatable opening lines, is prosaically handled, read in bland tones.

Refiguring the characters and then scattering them across space and time also diffused both my interest and sympathy. To convince us that the Crains are a real family, the production cast sisters Olivia, Shirl, and Theo with actors who look too much alike for clarity (though Nell and Luke, who are fraternal twins, look quite different.)

The cast certainly works hard, with Carla Gugino (as Olivia), Kate Segal (Theo) and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Luke) as the standouts. But, by my lights, none of them touch the raw shivering nerve that is Julie Harris.

Ms. Julie Harris

There’s another misstep with the portrayal of the Dudleys, Hill House’s caretakers. Fans of the original will remember the living skeletons from the 1963 film, especially Mrs. Dudley, then played by Rosalie Crutchley as a near-ghost herself. This time, Mrs. Dudley is a Christian fundamentalist who later evolves into an earth mother, while Mr. Dudley becomes a mellow old hippie. Hill House is supposed to shred the soul of all those in its shadow, but somehow it missed the Dudleys. You’d think they’d be mad as hatters, but here they’re a pair of mellow Air BnB hosts.

And then comes the final episode—which is just awful. Whether for commercial considerations, or just plain soft-heartedness, the series clumsily contrives what one commentator described to me as a “Spielbergian” conclusion—a “happy” ending that ties together all its threads in a warm hug, larded with ham-handed dialogue ripped from Oprah and Dr. Phil. Ideas better implied are served up on platters of homily. It’s a big letdown that undercuts both its ambitions and Shirley Jackson, as we find out that the big nasty old house isn’t so big and nasty after all.

And, that at last, brings us to my biggest problem with Hill House. And that’s Hill House. And for that we turn back again to the first adaptation, The Haunting.

From the 1963 film, the real star of the show.

From the very first frame of The Haunting, we know Hill House is bad, no question, full stop. Thanks to Robert Wise (who apprenticed with Orson Welles and Val Lewton) and his team, there is no doubt that Hill House is alive, hungry and deadly. It breatheswith foul life, perfectly captured in the opening sequence that tells the ghastly history of the place with unnerving brio. Everything about the House is slightly off, reflecting Shirley Jackson’s powerful prose. Even the daylight scenes feel wrong, with that hideous statue of Hugh Crain and family looming at the edges, where the film’s direction always keeps us looking. Ghosts, angry and alone, follow us everywhere. As Eleanor Vance and the house become one, there’s no doubt that Hill House is the real star of The Haunting.

Unfortunately, the new rebuild recasts Hill House as a supporting character. It seems like a perfectly nice bourgie pile, plush, elegant and harmless. It never feels like a bad place. There may be ghosts, but they don’t live in its bones. The spirits in it walls are absent. With all the time-shifts, there were even moments when I couldn’t tell if we were there or not and the occasional M.C. Escher tricks of perspective amount to little.

In the end, The Haunting of Hill House fails to haunt despite its fine intentions. Clearly, they should have listened to my wife.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now available. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.