The Haunting of Hill House is a horror drama by Netflix based on the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson. In the summer of 1992, a large, friendly Crane family (parents and five charming children) moved to the Hill House (named after the last owners of the estate). Olivia (architect) and Hugh (master of all trades) planned to restore the house for the summer by herself and by the end of August put it up for sale. However, the plans of the Cranes were not destined to come true. More and more often, at night, the children began to wake up screaming that they were ghosts. Little Nell sees a woman with a broken neck and her twin brother Luke sees a tall man in a pot. One of the older sisters, Theodora, reveals a strange ability to "see" a person's pain and fears by touching them. But parents don't believe the children's stories. The house is old, the floors squeak, the wiring is rotten, the trumpets humming, the wind howls in the mantelpiece pipes - that only children in the old house do not fantasize. And only when Hugh understands that his wife really begins to lose her mind, and inexplicable accidents are no longer subject to any logic and reasonable explanations, he hurries to take the children out of the house in the middle of the night and gives them to the upbringing of his aunt. Only the story doesn't end there, it all just begins...
All my friends know that I am a zealous opponent of frivolous readings of classical novels "in a new way". Usually, I swear like a shoemaker, if the writer, adapting the work, treats the source so freely that in the "dry residue" of the latter there is no "stone on the stone". But here I take my hat off to Mike Flanegan (Oculus, Silence, Gerald's Game). He has somehow miraculously transformed the canonical psychological horror - the events in which, according to all the laws of the genre, do not go beyond the "cursed" house - into a grand story that exists in two temporal dimensions - in the past, in a nightmarish home, and in the present, when the heroes have grown up. Flanegan broke the usual stereotype - the classic horror film ends as soon as the evil is defeated, or the heroes managed to escape from the walls of the hated house, or, at the worst, everyone died. In the Ghosts of the house on the hill, a la Flanigan all just began when the family escaped from the damned mansion. Two different stories - before and after - are connected by a strong thread, and a puzzle after a puzzle the whole chain of events turns into a single whole. A grandiose scenario. However, I still do not understand why Flanigan did not give this scenario as the original?
As far as I can remember, there is not much left of the original source: the name, the spiral staircase, the red door, and Mrs. Dudley's housekeeper (she had read the novel for a long time, maybe the maiden's memory fails).
Drama and horror in the series go hand in hand, periodically yielding to the advance stage each other (drama more often shines in the rays of soffits). Reading reviews of the series drew attention to the fact that it is the predominance of drama, many censors considered the minus series. I do not agree with you, colleagues). Finally, the horror rank of "I see dead people" came out, and you did not see him for "drama". That's not where we looked. I, for example, searched in every series of ghosts). And seriously, I suppose that the relationship between adult children Crane sometimes pulled the blanket on himself, but Flanigan so thoroughly thought out the history of each family member, he does not lose sight of a single detail, a single stroke to the image, and from one series to the next builds all the events and collisions in a row, leaving no question unanswered. I don't know about you, but I was really curious to know how a big, friendly family split up into separate "I" and didn't want to know one another. Is it really Hill House's fault?
Many complain about the "regularity" of the ghosts in the show. Tell me what to be afraid of - standard perfume with gray faces and colored lenses. Found that people scared people! No, in Ghosts at home on the hill, not everything is so obvious. If you look carefully, almost every scene has ghosts that observe the life of the family, even in the light of day. They stand outside the door when the family has a carefree breakfast; reflected in the windows of the kitchen cupboard while the children make sandwiches; silently standing outside the window while a teenage girl argues in the living room with her mother; The statues, turning their heads, watch you in dark corridors; they hide in the shadows behind the stairs in the basement, where the children try to get despite the strict prohibition of parents; sit under the dressing table in the nursery, where the children play; watch the children sitting by the bedside, as they sleep. Hill House is really full of ghosts. Not everyone can see them.
The end of the season has ruined everything. Writers have two troubles - where to start the work and how to finish it. Writers, judging by this, suffer from one problem - the outcome. Alas, the final series of the season did not become a "cherry on the cake".
Lovely series capable of splitting the serial community into two camps. One camp sings Ghosts at home on the hill praises praise and raises the series to the level of "masterpiece", the other - not shy of angrily arguing in response that the series is a total slag. And I don't know, where do I go?
Country: USA.
Year: 2018.