It’s this sense of the inevitable that drives a young Nell to be haunted by her visions of her future suicide, just as it convinces a father that the insane wife who attempted to murder two of their youngest children in a fit of paranoia is still the person he wants to spend eternity with.Īfter the family visits the mysterious red room together, we see an image of idyllic bliss in which Steve and his wife are expecting their first child Theo and her girlfriend are warmly embracing one another and Shirley and her husband are doing the same. For me, the show’s drift into sentimentality in its final few episodes wasn’t a confirmation that the Crain kids have learned the right way to ask for and receive love, but a creepy insistence that the family is primed to repeat the same patterns they once tried their hardest to resist. In the show, family is protection (both Nell and Luke use counting up to seven, the number of members of their family unit, as a kind of coping mechanism and a way to keep the ghosts at bay) but it is also a painful repetition of fears and anxieties that have no end in sight. This is an original and fascinating look at family drama, one that refuses neat and tidy endings and begs us to consider what we ultimately do with a home we can never truly leave.
Throughout the series, the show makes the argument that it’s better to see the terrifying last moments of someone we love over and over than to never see them at all again, and, that chasing these ghosts is an inevitable part of the human condition, as bleakly solid as the fact that one day each of us is going to die. Yet one of the most seductive terrors of the show is its look at how we allow the things that haunt us to keep doing so precisely because the opposite is so much more frightening or, as Steve puts it, a ghost is ultimately a wish. In many ways, it might be wise for a family this chaotic to deliberately disband, just as it would probably make more sense to burn down Hill House than allow it to remain. Shirley sees her marriage as a kind of business Steve secretly got a vasectomy so that he would never risk carrying on the family’s genetic legacy of madness Theo is so afraid of human intimacy that she wears gloves everywhere to protect her against feeling things too strongly Luke is desperately addicted to heroin Nell suffers from night terrors that lead to her own suicide.Ĭarla Gugino in The Haunting of Hill House. The story is a fiction that Hugh needs to believe in, even though his kids reject the sentimentality. He tells his son how his wife was the metaphorical kite, airy, drifting, ephemeral, while he was the line, steadfast, devoted, anchored to the earth. It’s the reason why many years after his wife’s suicide and the attempted homicide of his own children, Hugh still describes his relationship with his beloved as though it were gentle and balanced. The idea that family life itself is the hell we keep willingly returning to is at the heart the series. If Hill House is personified as a monster that feeds on its inhabitants, the family unit itself is also personified as a kind of organism that thrives on suffering in the form of co-dependency. It’s what they do with the knowledge that their metaphorical and physical home is being haunted that finally allows them to come together and cope with the past. While the fixers try to make excuses for their encounters with the paranormal, the flailers lose themselves to drugs or mental illness, becoming the very apparitions they struggle to escape.Īll of them see ghosts. Then there are the flailers, who are able to articulate their pain vividly but ultimately succumb to the darkness. There are the fixers, who try to deal with the madness they encounter with logical attempts to make things right. Each of the seven members of the Crain family, who spend a terrifying and life-changing summer together in the regal and frightening manor known as Hill House, fits into a loosely defined group. Of course, in the world of the series, the desire for logic, reason, and order is simply no match for pain. It’s an idea that is echoed in the final moments of the series, when Hugh’s son Steve, always his father’s eager helper, apologizes to his own wife: “I just want to fix this,” he tells her, as she moves to embrace him. “I can fix this,” he repeats over and over again, as though saying it will make it true. In one scene towards the end of Hill House, we see the father character, Hugh, holding his dead wife in his arms. The Haunting of Hill House’s allegiance to feelings over facts seems to hit a particularly potent nerve in a cultural moment when many people feel increasingly powerless to enact change in a world that often feels cruel, overwhelming and downright scary.