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Monday, October 7, 2024

The Haunting of Hill House: A series worth watching

News Desk |

Netflix has been on quite a roll lately. Week after week it has released sharply written and lavishly produced TV series that are superior in quality to many films we see nowadays at the box office. One of the most recent offerings has been its ten-part horror series, ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and it is easily among the Netflix series to date.

The show, based very loosely on a Shirley Jackson book of the same name centers on the Crain family, switching between their grief-stricken grown-up selves and the time they spent as kids in the haunted Hill House. Among them is Steven (Game of Throne’s Michael Huisman), an established horror writer who is perhaps the most cynical amongst the siblings about the existence of ghosts despite having built a career writing fictitious accounts of his dealings with the supernatural world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9OzG53VwIk

There is also Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) a mortician who likes to run things to a fault, Theo(Kate Siegel) the middle child who becomes a savvy child psychiatrist and twins Nellie (Victoria Pedretti) and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) both inflicted by very different kinds of demons. In Luke’s case, it is his dependency on drugs and Nellie who can’t seem to move past the loss of her husband.

Since the series’ release this month, the show has taken a life of its own, becoming one of the most talked about shows of 2018 and the third biggest supernatural series in the world behind American Horror Story and The Walking Dead — two shows that have been on the air for more than a decade.

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Most likely that is due to how well conceived the drama is in The Haunting of Hill House. Despite the show being a horror series, the series’ biggest selling card is the emotional core of the series. While the horror part of the show isn’t all that new or innovative, the way it deals with grief and loss is truly remarkable and makes for an incredibly compelling drama that adds to the high stakes of the series.

For those wondering if the show is perhaps not too scary, they need not worry, the emotional turmoil the characters face doesn’t undercut the spooky atmosphere. Skillfully balancing real life scares with supernatural ones, the show’s usage of two timelines to get us to understand the characters it centers the series on, effectively adds a layer of dread to even the most cliché of scares.

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Although the writing is a tad bit weak (particularly in the final episode), the show has more than enough going for it to warrant a watch, if not a second one as well. The show features quite an ensemble with the young cast being able to hold their own against their adult counterparts.

Equal parts touching and jarring, The Haunting of Hill House is a marvel of a show that simply must not be missed. Horror and drama fans alike will find something to enjoy what truly the best horror TV series is currently airing.