People who love horror movies and thrillers are often looking for one thing more than any other: to feel something–whether it’s scared, excited, or simply grossed out. And it’s rare that a movie–or even more rarely, a TV series–can make a viewer feel as many things, as deeply and persistently, as Mike Flanagan’s re-imaging of The Haunting of Hill House.
The story began as a novel by Shirley Jackson back in 1959. It was adapted to film in 1963 and again in 1999–both versions fairly faithful to the original work. Flanagan’s Netflix series, however, is very different–a re-interpretation of the themes of Jackson’s novel, using ghosts and haunting as powerful symbols of memory and loss that weaves a whole new story. But for all its deviation from Jackson’s original plot, is a beautifully made, beautifully acted, disturbing and very moving work.
Don’t look for any plot or character similarities to the original novel or the two movies. This is a whole new story, about an apparently (at first) happy family moving into a decaying mansion called Hill House, determined to undertake a major renovation and re-selling–a “flip” on a major scale. But the ghosts they find inhabiting the hallways and the very walls of Hill House now seep into the new residents as well, young and old, challenging and changing them all and leading to the death of one parents. The rest of the family escapes–barely–but the fear and pain and suffering from their ordeal lingers for years, affecting the children as they become adults themselves, until they are finally forced, ready or not, to return to Hill House and confront what happened to them there, and what they have become since.
