Every prestige-ish drama has to have a mystery box. Whether the cultural influence comes from J.J. Abrams or Game of Thrones or the other forces that prompt studios and creators to play follow the leader, no season of television, particularly genre television, can seem to get by without some burning mystery that you’ll have to wait till the season finale to see resolved.
The Haunting of Hill House is no exception. As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist podcast, the horror series from writer/director Mike Flanagan actually has two mystery boxes. The series gradually ladles out the story of the Crain family — two young parents and their five children — in both the past and the present, offering parallel mysteries in both timeframes. And its puzzles and scares are each centered around the titular haunted house.
In the past, the Crains faced a breaking point while trying to flip the old manor, when a series of spooky-but-unspoken of events led to the death of Olivia, the Crain matriarch, under suspicious circumstances. In the here and now, Nellie, the youngest sibling, has returned to the same house for the first time in twenty-six years and taken her life, to the shock and sadness of her surviving family members. But in both cases, the show lures you in with questions of how these deaths happened, what brought them about, and whether figuring out the answers for one could help explain the other.
But despite doubling up on major mysteries, The Haunting of Hill House succeeds where others like it have failed, because it’s constantly-if-gradually filling in the pieces of its puzzles and putting the spotlight on its characters between big reveals. That lets the show avoid (or at least reduce) the typical listless girth of the standard Netflix drama, giving the audience a chance to get to know the show’s major personalities so that its answers matter, and providing those reveals piece by piece rather than spinning its wheels until the grand finale.
Lights. Camera. Ahhhhh!-ction. (I'm so sorry.)
Each episode offers teases about the main mysteries and hints that add to your confusion rather than resolve it, but also puts in place concrete details that gradually allow the audience to piece together what happened before the big reveals. You may see one of the Crain siblings’ recollections about the last thing they remember from that fateful night, or their final interactions with their little sister, that helps clarify the series’s major events. Haunting of Hill House strikes the right balance between introduction and resolution for the most part, giving the viewer glimpses of the events that led to Olivia and Nellie’s deaths, and which make these tragedies more understandable and underline their supernatural foundation, without playing hide the ball or just giving away the answers from the jump.
But The Haunting of Hill House doesn’t resign itself to throwing out bread crumbs for ten episodes. Instead, the majority of the episodes function more like character stories, putting the spotlight on each member of the Crain family. Each of these spotlight episodes focuses on a different Crain, tracing their particular personalities and pathologies and tracking and how these issues are formed in the past and manifest in the present. Sometimes, the pop psychology at play is a little too simple and pat, but the upshot is that by the time the show starts dropping its big plot bombs, you know enough to care about who’s around to feel the heat, and you better understand the longstanding personal and emotional tangles between them that make it harder for any of the Crains to dive out of the way.
And the show has plenty of bombs to drop. One of the ways the series avoids the standard Netflix sludginess before a big reveal is by blowing the lid off of one of its major mysteries around the halfway mark and the immediately delving into the aftermath, in a way that both feels like a culmination of what the audience has already seen and an entree into the back half of the season. By establishing the setting, story, and most importantly the characters with clarity in the early going, the show can pace its reveals better than most of its contemporaries, and fill the in between spaces with personal moments and stories that give them greater impact.
Unfortunately, that superb structure is hamstrung by underwhelming scares, hit or miss imagery, and boatfuls of truly painful dialogue. Not every horror film or T.V. show has to be consistently, or even intermittently scary. But so often, The Haunting of Hill House is clearly straining to spook its audience, and yet, with a few exceptions, can only offer the standard bag of horror tricks. The show can boast some eye-catching framing and impressive cinematography, but is also prone to numbing the presentation with the same mute blue palette over and over again. And time after time, the show’s first season descends into tortured, faux-poetic monologues, which say nothing and say it verbosely. The show does better with conversations, letting a talented cast build chemistry and rapport, but its overreliance on grand, empty speeches hobbles the series from episode one.
"Would people buy an entire book of purple prose-filled voiceover?"
The first season’s weakest moments come at the beginning and the end, when far from being able to rely on painting character portraits or slow-spinning its mysteries, The Haunting of Hill House is tasked with onboarding the audience to its universe and personalities, and then wrapping and summing everything up. Even with the inflated runtimes of its episode (which are less of a chore here then with some other, more bloated streaming shows), the series feels rushed when trying to say hello and goodbye to everyone and everything. While a measure of impressionistic storytelling and artistic daring is firmly present at both ends, the premiere and finale fall back on thumbnail sketches, shortcuts, and trite truisms that leave you underwhelmed to start and a little unsatisfied in the finish.
But for the bulk of its run The Haunting of Hill House overcomes its flaws to produce consistently engaging television. The structure and approach the series maintains — focusing on establishing its main characters’ individual journeys before bringing them together, and parceling out the answers to its major questions before everything locks in place — strengthen it when elements like the dialogue or the scares start to sag.
The first season of the horror series isn’t exactly one for the ages. Too often, the show gropes for meaning or artistry but only manages to grab muddled clichés. Beyond its superlative, long take-filled family hashout, the show falls squarely into the realm of “quite good” rather than the great. And yet, it succeeds where so many shows like it fail, telling a multifaceted story in a way that preserves mystery and defines its characters amid the Faustian bargains at play. That keeps the show commendable, and more importantly watchable, throughout its strongest scenes, weaker moments, and the ghostly interludes in between.
