Mandatory Mad Fiction Dissection Table: The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of MY HOUSE

At some point, y’all are going to realize these reviews are optimally fun if I take issue with the Thing in Question. OMG IT’S SO GOOD is not a substantive review, WHY WON’T THEY HIRE ME is not in-depth critique, and it’s rough to make YELLY SARCASTIJOKES when you really just liked it so much and can’t wait for more.  BUT THAT POINT IS NOT NOW. 

Between What We Do In the Shadows and The Haunting of Hill House, it’s entering old skool SF Squeecast territory up in here with the positivity and the praise and shit. Pretty sure I could have given you an ab workout with the laughter possibilities of bagging on Interstellar. (I haven’t seen it yet but…come on. I’m not gonna love it) But noooo. You guys picked something I passionately love. Not just passionately love, but feel deeply emotionally connected to. THANKS A LOT. What am I supposed to say? It’s just great and you should watch it! The second season is coming out next week Horror thrives on twists so I can’t really tell you anything that happens over the course of the show and unless we want to REALLY get into cinematography, I have almost nothing constructive to say about The Haunting of Hill House!

Well. I say almost.

I really and truly am not going to spoil this show for you. It is simply fantastic. It’s a haunted house story loosely (and I mean loosely. Like really loose. Like Footloose) based on Shirley Jackson’s iconic novel of the same title. Plot starts out extremely standard: family (with a LOT of kids for a pretty young couple but they do seem super into each other so maybe just explore the miraculous new concept of birth control from here on out, guys) moves into a suspiciously cheap giant-ass house and everything goes tits-up with a quickness and you know, obviously they don’t leave because white people reasons. (As an aside, it occurs to me that so much contemporary horror isn’t necessarily body horror or psychological horror or spiritual horror but real estate horror. Mike Flanagan has even done it before if you generalize to property horror; Oculus is about an evil fancy-ass mirror a lord owned one time. It strikes me as a particularly white and middle class fearset—the things you strive to own can punish you for the audacity of thinking you do own them, and incidentally if you buy a house that’s too nice for your natural-born socio-economic class you better hold on to your fucking hat because the full force of the cosmos is gonna eat you for it. Do not pass go, do not move on up. ANYWAY THE DEAD AIN’T GONNA LET YOU FLIP THAT HOUSE, HUGH!)

But nothing else about it is standard. It’s structured in two time periods IT-style, but this allows for an almost time-travel like level of intertwining and reversal of cause and effect that’s just breathtaking to watch unfold. HHH is atmospheric as fuck and full of feeling and shot like a dream and the actors are so wonderful and they don’t even need to elevate the material like so many do in horror films and TV because the material is FUCKING ACES. It contains two separate plot twists I not only didn’t see coming, but have, in fact, never seen done in onscreen horror. It has a jump scare to end all jump scares. Even the simple trick of having random people standing still in shadows in the deep background of every shot because this house has more ghosts than a warehouse built to manufacture and export nothing but ghosts, is unique as hell and makes re-watching a delightful game of spot-the-ghoul. The ending made me sob so hard I couldn’t breathe and woke up the whole house (more on that in a minute). I have loved horror all my life, and I wish I had written this thing, which is the highest praise I got.

But I did say I had almost nothing constructive to say. Not nothing.

My biggest gripe is simply that this beautiful beast is called The Haunting of Hill House.

I’ve read The Haunting of Hill House, and it, sir, is not The Haunting of Hill House.

The plot has almost nothing in common with the book beyond the names of the characters and the existence of a haunted house, with Shirley and Steve added on as obvious references to the two horror writers that inspired it. And I guess that’s fine, it’s an adaptation, and I understand that, at the moment, Hollywood is more likely to greenlight something that is based on a known property than a random prestige horror series called The Haunting of Crain House. But it’s an original story that doesn’t really even touch on the themes of Jackson’s book, and in one important way, cuts directly against them. None of which would even come up if it weren’t named for and advertised as a screen version of that very book. I fully just pretend it’s called The Haunting of Crain House for muy sanity.

I just really, really wish they hadn’t used that line. That line. One of the most famous openings in all of literature, and definitely in all of horror. This bad boy: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The show uses it twice, and both times piss me right off. But the first one just annoyed me slightly. The second use is the only real, heavy misstep of the whole show and my face made an expression like I just ate a lemon covered in knives.

The show opens with it. Fine. Of COURSE you’re gonna use it because it’s fucking brilliant. But it gives this line to Steve, and strongly implies that it is from one of his books, which is a sack of bullshit. Shirley Jackson struggled all her life for legitimacy and recognition as a woman writer and the wife of a professor in the goddamned 50s when professor’s wives were expected to have about as much agency, intellect, and attention paid to them as a professor’s hat. She is still not half as well known as other, less amazing, writers of her era, and what she is known for is mostly The Lottery, a single short story most everyone knows because they had to read it in school, not her astonishing novels. Every single one of her books deals deeply with the repression of women, the denial of their experience, the silencing of their voices and their trauma, their inability to be heard and seen and respected by the men around them. Part of the reason bloody houses show up so much in her work is the opposite of that property horror I mentioned before: women in her world were defined by and so often confined to their houses, expected to give all their energy to houses, to dwell in them alone without complaint for long periods while men and children went out into the world, to, in a very real sense, haunt their homes themselves. The house, for a woman of that era, was a locus of power and oppression: master and lover and jailer. If you want to talk about houses eating people, that is piercingly a woman’s story. Our whole society raised girls to happily look forward to a house eating them until about five minutes ago, and even then only half of us got the memo. It’s just that few people other than women care about that story. Now, is the domineering house and the position it occupies in the American family part of the subtext of HHH? Yes? But not like that. It loses the personal punch of Jackson because the effects of the house on the male characters are treated with considerably more weight and screentime, so it cannot and does not want to deal with the archetype of The House as it pertains to women oppressed by it.

And to center fucking Steve in this narrative, to give a male writer credit for those immortal lines and make the story much, much more about his interaction with the house than anyone else’s, just sucks. It pretty much implies this dumb dude wrote Shirley Jackson’s books in this universe. Whick sucks more. It would have been no effort at all to swap Shirley and Steve, to make Steve the uptight mortician and Shirley the troubled writer, in fact, I think that would have been better, and more able to pull out the themes of the book and justify the title. But instead we get another beleaguered genius man with brown hair and stubble who treats his wife and family like crap (oh my god, Steve, you are a crapcanoe. I hate Steve. Fucking Steve is the goddamned worst. But that’s not a comment on the quality of the writing: I feel pretty certain that hating Steve is warmly encouraged by the script.) and he gets to speak with Shirley Jackson’s voice NO NO NO.

But I honestly could get over that, it’s irritating but minor if you just pretend this isn’t really based on Jackson at all. 

And then they use it again in the end. 

And they change it. 

This perfect fucking paragraph that I and so many others use to teach writing gets tweaked in the end so that goddamned Steve reads out over the final shot: “Whatever walked there did not walk alone.”

Fuck. You. 

You do not get to rewrite Shirley Jackson to be warm and fuzzy and then put it in the mouth of a male writer and act like that’s good and deep. I am not okay with it. Especially wrapped around a show that is much more about male pain and trauma and family relations and how they are affected by the women in their lives than it is on women in any aspect, despite having a number of truly excellent and memorable female characters…who nevertheless do embody some troubling stereotypes about women’s mental health—they are all fragile af, half the women are straight up insane and usually got there due to issues surrounding their children, none of them are out to protect the family the way the brave men are, and the less fragile ones are mean, controlling, withholding, emotionally abusive cheaters. It’s not the best representation of women.  Which sounds like I am mad at this show! I am not! It is a gothic horror, I probably wouldn’t even notice if it weren’t called freaking The Haunting of Hill House and therefore invoking a book that is explicitly about women’s pain, how we get to those dark places, and how impossible it is to get out when the world is a patriarchal festival of fuckery. The fact is, I fully expect The Haunting of Bly Manor, the second season of this show and a wholly separate story based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, to have similarly little to do with its source material and I am all for it. Because The Turn of the Screw isn’t a seminal feminist work by a writer whose life was defined by her struggle to be heard.

So awesome that Steve, named for the far more famous male horror writer, spends the entire movie appropriating and profiting off the experiences of his (mostly) female relatives that he did not himself witness or help them heal from, with absolutely no comeuppance, gets to appropriate the writing of Shirley Jackson as well. Neat-o! I would almost think it’s a deliberate commentary, except that anyone who calls him out on it is portrayed as bitchy for doing so and the main emotional arc is all his and he ends with getting most everything he wants even though you don’t deserve it, STEVE. 

Fucking Steve IS the house, digesting everyone else to keep himself fat and fed. And the show does pretty much say that part…it’s just delivered by an evil ghost, so you’re supposed to feel bad for him having to hear mean things about himself instead of being like: Yes. Correct. You are a shit, Steve. Get eaten by a kitchen.

And the new version of That Line is not better or deeper than the original, especially since the ending of the book and the show have nothing to do with each other—the ending of the show actually has much more in common with Jackson’s other masterpiece We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And I love the ending! I just wish they weren’t so obviously proud of themselves for rewriting that line. It’s cheesy and weird and offputting, because Hill House does not get better. It doesn’t learn a heartwarming lesson about love and family or whatever. Not in any version of it. And if you hadn’t read the book, you’d think Flanagan wrote those lines himself and cleverly bookended his story with them instead of presuming to edit one of the finest passages in English literature. BAD SCREENWRITER. YOU STOLE FIZZY LIFTING DRINK. NO. BISCUIT.

Ok. Deep breath. 

Everything else is pretty great! Episodes five and six are basically the best horror I’ve ever seen, and possibly the best television, full stop! Victoria Pedretti is one in a million and I hope she gets all the roles forever! The confetti speech at the end is so good and heartbreaking I think about it all the time, two years after watching it, and honestly I probably want it read at my funeral. (Again why the bullshit with That Line is so frustrating—there are lines in this show that are absolutely brilliant, almost as good, they didn’t need to muck with Shirley’s business). I mean, sure, I would have liked a little more of the individual ghosts’ stories or the history of the house, and I’m not certain I really get what Poppy’s deal was, other than being a bitch, and maybe I could have done with a little less focus on the manpain when it was mostly the women being tortured, but I don’t really care too much about those things because it made me feel and think and yearn, and that’s what I’m looking for these days. That’s all I ask. Be problematic if you have to (but you could not!) just make me feel something other than detached annoyance, plz.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the ending, and I’m a little whatever about it. It does feel awfully similar to the ending of the first season of American Horror Story, but the road they took to get there is so different it’s kind of…fine. AHS doesn’t have copyright over that emotional conclusion. Poppy’s probably not going to be the best roommate but, you know, real estate horror. The main complaints seem to be that it takes a sharp turn from the house’s rules/habits as already established for a forced happy ending (and you can go online and find out that the original ending was decidedly not happy—I think that the final version still has the ambiguity as to what reality is without coming down hard on the most fucking depressing thing I can think of. They didn’t need to explicitly Show a Red Thing to make me feel that uncertainty).

And I guess. Maybe. The whole show is about family and memory and the desperation for connection, so it makes sense to me, even though the house does appear to get therapy, start going to Haunted Houses Anonymous meetings and doing the twelve steps halfway through, but I can’t really get past how affecting I personally found the ending to get snippy about it. Especially since whether or not that ending, with a whole lot of dead people, is a happy one is very much up to the viewer’s interpretation. 

The fact is that I watched The Haunting of Hill House when I was about four or five weeks postpartum. I was an emotional funhouse. It was super rough for me to watch any of the kids in danger because ha ha apparently now I overidentify with mothers and cannot handle fictional people losing fictional kids. EXTREMELY fun but true and not at all TMI story: at one point early in the show, the youngest child does a really high-pitched scream-cry and milk shot out of me across the room in this fine arc like a fucking sprinkler system, all that baby sounds hungry, sad, or motherless, supertitties to the rescue! SHUT UP, BOOBS, YOU CANNOT HELP THAT FICTIONAL CHILD, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO, SQUIRT OUT A GHOST’S EYE? IDIOTS.

Human bodies, am I right?

So yeah, I watched it while utterly sleep-deprived, up late in the dark nursing a baby while my stitches slowly healed. When the end of this long boye rolled around and Mrs. Dudley’s whole story was revealed, I LOST IT. I just held my baby and sobbed and sobbed, like, not pretty Hollywood oh I’m so moved tears, but big hitching breathless dog crying. My husband came running at four am to find me a complete wreck, soaked in milk, the baby looking confused, and then I just made him start over and watch episode one with me immediately.

I really love this show. I can forgive it the stuff that irritated my feminist gland, and particularly my feminist author gland, because everything else is so beautiful and correct. It does what only horror can do in just the way it does: put you through so much darkness and make you feel that very specific relief when the light returns. It reminded me what I love about horror, and I have loved horror all my life: that it is in the end always about coping with death and finding connection with the living, about revelation and restoration, and the uneasy relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary. That’s my shit. That’s all my shit. And The Haunting of Hill House delivers.

And now, in 2020, all our houses have eaten us and we’re never allowed to leave, so fuck it all, put on Bly Manor and let’s scream about it.