Horror tales frequently contain a lot of cliched tropes and tendencies. Filmmakers mostly spin the wheel and use whatever tropes come to mind. However, the Haunting of Hill House accomplished something unique and created nothing from scratch. It played straight through the clichés of the haunted house ghost story, but it did it with such brilliance that it seemed new again. You can watch it on Netflix.
The Haunting of the Hill House Plot Summary
The Haunting of Hill House is based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 book of the same name. It covers the journey of the Crane family across two timelines in ten episodes. One is set in the past, addressing their experiences living in Hill House. And the other is set in the present when a family tragedy compels them to reunite.
The mystery of the night that drove them to abandon Hill House is central to the narrative. A night that took their mother’s life and permanently traumatized the five surviving children.
The Cosmic Horror in The Haunting of Hill House
First, let’s clearly define what precisely cosmic horror is. The realization that nothing you or even the rest of civilization will ever accomplish will make a significant enough impact to matter—that the cosmos is more enormous and convoluted than you will ever comprehend—is what we know as cosmic horror. H.P. Lovecraft popularised cosmic Horror, and its horror elements were incomprehensible, alien, and yet profoundly humane.
And that’s precisely what the Haunting of Hill House sets to capture. As much as we are told a tale of a family tragedy, it’s also a mythical tale of Hill House that stands forever. Hill house traps the living souls and squeezes the life out of them. The souls do not linger because they died an unfortunate death. The Hill House is not just a burial site; it’s a purgatory.
How the Character fit in the Mythos of Hill House
The Haunting of Hill House has the advantage of being a ten-episode series, allowing it to delve deeply into its characters and make you care about them. We spent the first half of Hill House delving into the minds of its protagonists.
There’s Steve, the oldest, a struggling writer who found success writing about his family’s Hill House adventures. Then there’s Shirley, who owns and manages her own funeral home with her husband, Theo, the middle one, who is a child psychologist with extraordinary psychic powers. The twins, Nell and Luke, are the youngest and most mentally wounded.
They are all extremely flawed yet humane characters whose trauma results from incidents that happened in Hill House. The death of the mother and their father’s distrust has broken the family apart, but it is the horrors of the night that still bring them nightmares.
Nell, the youngest sister, is constantly dreaming of her death in the future. This signifies that the Hill House has crossed space and time. “Time is like confetti,” says Nell in the last episode. The house has decided how to torment its victims and has written their destinies. There’s this idea that the Hill House is “alive,” but the only way they know how to cope with it is to wait for it to die. But it does not. It waits for the predestined moment and strikes you dead.
Final Thoughts
The Haunting of Hill House is not just about the miseries of the Crane family; it’s about the Hill House that has been left alone for years. On the surface, it may feel like the Hill House hates you for your humanity, but when you look deeper, it has grown lonely and bitter and only wishes to have company.
Hill House has no roots, no humanity. The horror of its purgatory is incomprehensible. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, it wishes to have a company and not rot on its own. It is aware of its immortality and traps souls to the end of time if there is ever an end to the Hill House.