The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Haunting of Hill House (2018) – M. Flanagan

I capped off 2020 with this 10-episode miniseries from Horror director Mike Flanagan (that originally aired on Netflix but I saw courtesy of my local library’s DVD collection).  I haven’t watched much TV in recent years, even with the current renaissance underway, but I dabble here and there.  To me, the up-side is the ability to develop deeper richer characterisations and also to have extended story arcs.  Here, we follow a family of seven who purchase haunted Hill House in order to fix it up and flip it; their one summer in the house proves to have a lasting effect on their lives.  The series alternates between scenes of the family in the house (when the oldest child, Steven, is 13 or so) and scenes that are 25 or more years later when everyone is older (and played by different actors, including Timothy Hutton as the dad). In these non-flashback scenes, we discover that everyone in the family is coping with some serious issues, potentially stemming from the fact that the mother died during that fateful summer.  The beauty of the series is that it manages to create and sustain some ambiguity about whether the various mental and relationship problems of the characters are due to grief and the trauma around an unexpected death or alternately are due to evil ghosts and their long icy fingers that reach well beyond the perimeter of the evil house.  Viewers and the characters themselves are torn about which it could be (i.e., the ghosts we and they see could be hallucinations or even just visceral memories of the past).  The down-side of extended TV series is that they sometimes struggle to maintain a satisfying flow or they can’t quite seal the deal and conclude in a satisfying way.  Here, as the last couple of episodes unfold, the ambiguity around the events is (I suppose necessarily) resolved and this makes things somewhat too literal.  That said, the fact that the ending harkens back rather explicitly to the classic film version of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting (1963) did help this viewer to accept the conclusion.  I think too that the messiness of the ending (trying to resolve 7 character trajectories all at once) leaves some things open to interpretation.  In the end, I enjoyed this and recommend it for fans of the supernatural and also family drama.