‘The Haunting of Hill House’ Is Why Modern Horror Is Great

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Take the tone and paranormal setting of the Conjuring movies, add the visual manipulations from Oculus, throw in the creepy themes from the Babadook, and finally run it through the slow burn of dread tone from IT and you get The Haunting of Hill House. Netflix’s new show, which I just marathoned over its premiere weekend, is positively creepy, visually tense, and packed with great acting (hey it’s Carla Gugino and Daario Naharis from Game of Thrones!). It’s a great watch for Halloween season, even if you’re not a horror aficionado like I am because it does a great job of weaving a mysterious storyline with multiple threads through the heart of the haunted house story. But, even more importantly, this show represents how far horror in movies and television has progressed.

As a brief, spoiler-less overview: the show follows the five Crain siblings after one of them dies unexpectedly. The remaining four then begin to experience supernatural phenomenon, which in turn causes them to reunite and discuss the memories of their childhood at Hill House. Each of the kids has moved on in their own way, but each also has a secret from their childhood hauntings. Only after the siblings reveal those secrets and confront their past are they able to discover what really happened at Hill House. It’s a great horror/mystery hybrid, with twists in the later episodes that have a creepy and cool payoff. More importantly, it represents the tremendous progress that has come to storytelling in the horror genre.

When luminaries like Hitchcock, Carpenter, and Kubrick first made their mark on the genre, it was largely based on creepy tonal scares, from the terrifying score of Psycho to the frightening setting of The Shining. After that, we progressed to the era of occult tales like The Exorcist and Poltergeist, before moving onto the slasher period beginning with Halloween that would dominate the genre for decades. In my life, slasher movies have been supplanted by the found footage style–beginning with the Blair Witch Project–and then the “torture gore” era of films like Saw and The Human Centipede. All of these periods had their own standouts and classics, but horror movies have consistently had the problem of being plot-driven, constant scare vehicles that lack thematic grandeur or intellectual substance.

That is not true of the horror movies from the last 10-15 years, as directors have taken all those old-school tones, settings, and antagonists and added in something that was persistently missing: humanity. We have films that use horror to look at how we deal with mental health problems (the Babadook) and other films delve into our most primal fears (IT). Modern horror films focus not on the monsters but the people, recognizing that in a great story it’s not the monster that is most compelling; it’s how the people react to it.

The Haunting of Hill House does that especially well. It’s a haunted house movie that’s barely about the haunted house. Almost none of the movie takes place there. The focus of this show is about the family that lived there, and how the five siblings that escaped from the horrors of their youth have come to cope with those experiences.

Yes, at its core this is a spooky story about ghosts in a haunted house. Yes, it has a lot of creepy visuals, jump scares, and tension-filled scenes that will make you stop breathing for a minute on end. But those are just devices to examine deeper topics like depression, drug addiction, survivor’s guilt, grief, fear of death, and the fragile nature of the mind. To go into more specifics would spoil the mystery that becomes clear as the series progresses, so I won’t, but the heart of the story is about how far people will go to protect those they love. About how parents will squeeze their children so tight to protect them that they might smother them to death.

That’s what makes this show great, and it’s what makes the horror genre today so great. The scares tell us more about ourselves, how we react to the unknown and unexplainable. The Haunting of Hill House shows the different coping mechanisms that the average Joe would develop to a series of traumatic events in their formidable years. There’s the older brother who represses the memories, the oldest sister who denies them with hostility, the youngest siblings who develop addiction and mental health issues, and the middle child who becomes reclusive and cold. What happened in Hill House isn’t really the story being told here, but rather what happens after. It’s about a broken family who need to confront the evil they thought they left behind them.

Great horror doesn’t just scare us with what it puts on the screen, but what it puts in our minds. So many horror movies today have left lasting impressions that sent chills down my spine or put a lump in my throat days, weeks, or months after I finished watching. The Haunting of Hill House is going to do the same to me, as I wonder whether that bump in the night is just a pipe in the wall or a ghoul from my past. .

Image via Youtube

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Hey, I saw this on Post Grad Problems. Check it out.

Josh T.

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