The Haunting of Hill House - Season One

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
Season One
(2018)
Dir - Mike Flanagan
Overall: MEH

Mike Flanagan's joint venture with Netflix to reinterpret Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House as a ten-part miniseries was all about mixed emotions for me.  When first hearing of this program, I was 110% not on board.  The book has been adapted twice, (once exceptionally, once horrendously), and in an era where more and more properties are being dug up out of the grave to get a reboot or sequel or whatever, the idea of another version of this story in any kind of cinematic capacity did not appeal to me in the slightest.  After it aired though, got unanimous praise, and some people I know who watched it assured me that that it was not an adaptation at all, I dropped my "remake" expectations and took the show on.

Then from the very beginning of actually watching The Haunting of Hill House, the conflicting emotions continued.  Before getting into the details of what went wrong and also theoretically right, it is important to discuss Flanagan and the show's birth in general.  The writer/director was approached by Amblin Partners, (DreamWorks Studies), to adapt the novel as a television program.  Respectfully, Flanagan has gone on record multiple times, not only about how huge of a fan he is of both the book and Robert Wise's original film version, but how perfect each was and how illogical stretching that story out to miniseries length would be.  Given the opportunity and acting out The Haunting fanboy in him though, he envisioned a completely different way to go about it, meaning to not adapt the book at all and just make up his own thing while consistently referencing elements of it.

"In the night...in the dark" for one was used quite liberally.

While it is doubtlessly a wise move not to turn Jackson's novel into a padded, overly long series when the material totally does not call for such a thing, at the same token, why bother taking any elements from the book and titling your show after it at all if the story is absolutely unique from the source material?  Well the answer obviously is brand recognition and since a production company came to Flanagan first and not the other way around, basically it had to be The Haunting of Hill House in some way, (be it vague or explicit), or it probably was not going to get on the air.  We can speculate as to whether or not Flanagan or some other filmmaker would have responded with, "nah, how bout I just write my own thing and we'll call it something else?" and if it would have actually got made, but the way it happened, it was Hill House or nothing.

I can then understand the mere existence of this series, if not fully agreeing with it.  A paycheck is a paycheck and a career opportunity to work with something you love and make it a massive event like this is something no one can honestly fault Flanagan with taking.  Again, studios like to use things that people are already familiar with so yes, we all get it.  It is good to have no snobbish chips on one's shoulders about the program since then we can view it for what it is.  I wish it was not called The Haunting of Hill House and I wish Mike Flanagan just made his own haunted house miniseries with no inescapable ties to make to the novel, but I also wish I was Thanos sometimes so lets get on with it.

I mean seriously, just think of the traffic you could clear up.

I have seen every film Mike Flanagan has made to date and I like some of them while mildly to greatly disliking others.  I also recognize that the director definitely has a style and that style is to "play it safe".  Both the horror elements to Hill House and the dramatic ones very much are "playing it safe".  Safe and commercial.  Flanagan is knowingly taking cliches from everywhere and putting them into a framework where he can really dig into them for over ten-plus hours and he has also made it as user friendly as possible.  By the end of this program there are virtually no loose ends and everyone is made to leave with a sense of all of their tension having been released.  For the most part, every character overcomes all of their trauma to begin living the fairytale, "happily ever after" dream.  The final episode of this show is drenched in Disney flavored sap to the point of getting a stomach ache from it, but it also makes sense coming from Flanagan.  Ambiguity finds little to no place in most of his work and characters triumphing over the evil within and around them is what he likes his viewers to leave with.  Perhaps never more so than here.

The way the show is scripted is very specifically "scripty".  Meaning very, very, very wordy.  A buddy of mine described it as "The Monologuing of Hill House" and it is readily apparent why.  There is not a single character or a single episode where at least someone, (usually more than once), gets to indulge in an overtly word-heavy speech while all of the other characters act with inhuman patience and let them prattle on and on until they are finished.  There was one excellent scene between sisters Theo, (Kate Siegel), and Shirly, (Elizabeth Reaser), where they actually interrupt each other as they are arguing, but basically aside from this, all of the dialog interactions are remarkably unrealistic.  People do not let people talk like this, it is that simple.  You know when they do though?  In the movies...or in this case, in the TV show.

Truth in advertising.

The way that everything is scripted here, this is no doubt a deliberate move.  These actors were probably ecstatic about all of the dialog that they got.  It is more structured like a play than anything and the inner-thespian in most actors likely appreciated the pages upon pages of words they got to work with.  The reason it is so word-heavy outside of this is again to "play it safe".  No one can watch this show without being absolutely crystal clear as to what every single person in it is feeling.  The viewer is not left to ponder anything to themselves.  Certain plot details are left open for several episodes yes, but that is not what I mean.  I mean there is so much dialog and endless opportunities for the characters to speak their minds without any interference that you simply cannot ever be lost as to what they are experiencing.

What does this do to your brain as you are watching it?  Well, it essentially tricks you into caring for these characters and it works.  I kept really wanting to like The Haunting of Hill House for this very reason.  Honestly, all of the horror parts to the show were nonsense.  Flanagan really, really dove into his script and he and his writers took so much time conveying the severe dysfunction of this family that all of the would-be scary bits come off as a severe afterthought.  I will admit that this is the horror movie cynic in me talking but c'mon, boo scares, generic creepy music, every ghost made-up to look like they work at a haunted house every Halloween, and of course supernatural entities only doing the most dramatically scary thing the plot wants them to do with no logic attached to it at all?

See, it is horror because GET IT?

Why do ghosts generally tilt their heads and open their mouths wide to scream at you?  Why do they like to play pranks on people like gradually banging on their doors and windows until a crucial moment when the characters are intensely dialoging?  Why would a "good" ghost only show up to stop a "bad" ghost from doing something bad after they gave us enough dialog to know what we needed to know and not early enough to get the person they are trying to protect out of danger immediately?  How come some ghosts who did not die at Hill House still show up there when it is pretty directly stated that you have to die there to stay there?  There is a lot of this stuff and I do not even really classify them as plot-holes so much as just the usual, lazy supernatural horror movie cliches that get used ad nauseam and never critically looked at as making no sense and potentially taking the viewer out of the experience.  There was one moment where Theo actually says "aren't we gonna tell them what we saw?" addressing another annoying cliche where people in horror movies keep seeing terrifying shit and keep it to themselves.  Everyone still does exactly that in this show, but I at least got a chuckle that they acknowledged how unnatural it is to do so.

Really though, most people who watch movies enjoy this kinda stuff.  Horror fans like to be scared the way they always are.  They like to jump.  They like to know something is creepy by how it looks and sounds.  They like when scary things happen that they know are scary because they are watching a horror movie.  Essentially, they like familiarity.  It is always a very difficult undertaking to put enough horror movie things in your horror movie, (or TV show), that qualify it as such yet at the same time trying to make them somewhat unique.  Flanagan completely fails in this "unique" regard here, but for sure he made people yelp at their TV and get tricked into getting scared the way they are supposed to.  So, job well done I guess?

See, it is horror because GET IT?

What I really kept rooting for was what this show was about on paper.  Which is an examination of how a haunting can make a family dysfunctional.  This is an incredibly good idea.  What is the worst way that living in a haunted house could traumatize a group of people for years afterwards?  Every member of the Crain household who spent a mere few weeks in Hill House grows up and suffers from a barrage of issues.  This makes the house itself intimidating as an evil presence and something to take seriously.  It also makes the mystery and confusion of what happened on their last night there as well as then how their father handled it and how it trickled down to all of them as they grew up a wonderful avenue to dramatically get into.  Flanagan definitely did get into it, no mistaking that.

It is HOW he got into it though that is still just as opposing as everything else I discussed.  Flanagan uses the age old, sturdy and true, "safe" troupes to assign to his family here.  There is a lesbian, a heroin addict, a lunatic, a guilty control freak, a hack, an abandoning father who means well, and a mother terrified of letting her children loose in the real world.  Everyone in the family has to be dysfunctional, but they also have to have defining, exclusive, and commonplace quirks to themselves.  There is grey area to all of them, but then again not really.  Not realistically at least.  Go ahead try and show me a family in real life where every member of it is a part-stereotype to this degree, (who again hardly ever interrupt each other when they are yelling at them), but I am pretty sure that you will come up with no such family.

Mommy tried to poison him so now he poisons himself with drugs because GET IT?

Now does all of this make for good television?  Well the general consensus is a bellowing "yes".  The show is a hit and despite of or because of all the issues that it has, it is clear why it is a hit.  Flanagan played it safe.  It is all so familiar beyond just fans of the novel and the original film who recognize some of the names and lines of dialog.  We are conditioned to feel what we are supposed to, get spooked when we are supposed to, we all know exactly what happened by the end of it, and we are all happy that everyone's problems 100% went away once it was over.  It is very crowd pleasing.  In its own ways it is as realistic and convincing as a Looney Tunes cartoon though and that is really what I at least could not enjoy about it.

A more hard-boiled approach to such an interesting premise would have been so much nicer.  The dialog could have flowed more naturally, the characters personal issues could have been far less on-the-nose, we could have been left to psychologically contemplate more, the horror elements could have been anything but what they were, (maybe showing us zero supernatural entities at all like Robert Wise did for a start?), etc.  This is all my problem though.  The Haunting of Hill House does what most people want it to do.  It is very competent, very well made, very well acted, and completely devoid of risks and uncertainty.  It is a ten part miniseries about a haunted house with characters in it.  Yup, it sure is.

Now lets all forget our troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream!