* I have several upcoming movie and TV blogs coming up which were written before the writers’ strike. I’m just going to post them until I run out.
“You publish this, you know what it costs.” Shirley says this to Steve about his memoir of their family’s time in a haunted house.
I waited to do this one so I could include spoilers. That having been said - Spoilers ahead!
First off, I have to declare my love for the original book and the 1963 film. Shirley Jackson was the queen of the unreliable narrators and it was magnificent! Even though she intended (according to later interviews) to always make Hill House haunted, the book is written in just the write way to make you question whether the events are supernatural or not. Director Robert Wise captured this atmosphere with even more subtly in the movie. And if anyone in the comments asks me about the 1999 version, you will get a long rant about fourteen year old me seeing that in theatres and experiencing wanting my money back for the first time.
Mike Flanagan rearranged the story completely, but kept that sense of paranoia and second guessing. By the way, I refused to watch this at first, declaring it looked nothing like the book (I had been burned before!). My friends lied to me and said, “Oh no, it’s pretty close to the book.” Turns out they’d never read the book although one of them has since (looking at you, Kira Shay).
Trigger warning - if you decide to watch the Haunting of Hill House, it deals in grief, suicide, mental health, addiction, and family trauma).
In all versions, Hill House is a structure which feeds on the energy of people. In Flanagan’s take, the house’s receives a family seven come to flip it in the early 90s. The parents, Hugh and Liv, are hoping this is the final time they will have to renovate a house and sell it so the family can have their forever home. Their child include Steve the skeptic, Shirley the practical one, Theo the stand-offish one, and the twins Luke and Nell. The house feeds upon each of them until one mysterious night Liv dies and Hugh takes them all away without a proper explanation.
As adult, the five kids blame Hill House or their parents for their issues. None of them have a good relationship with Hugh, who left the house boarded up to rot without further reasoning. Luke is a heroin addict, constantly in and out of rehab. Nell suffers from sleep paralysis, depression, and dies in Hill House at the beginning of the series. Theo is a child psychiatrist who uses her power of touching people/things to get emotions, the reason she wears gloves and shuts herself off to others most of the time. Shirley runs a funeral business with her husband, an endeavor she wants to be perfect. Finally, Steve turned around his failed novelist career by becoming a paranormal investigator and writing books based on what others see in haunted places. In case you didn’t already guess, I’m going to be focusing on Steve.
Flanagan mixes in word-for-word quotes from the original book in Steve’s narration from his own work. Jackson’s spooky and straight-forward style adds to the idea of Steve’s writing hiding his own disbelief. It lends itself well to the internet theories that the black mold in Hill House actually caused everything.
I get why Steve wanted to use their childhood as the basis of a book. And he was totally right. It was a bestseller. However, the way he goes about the process felt backwards. He writes the book, sends it to an editor and agent, gets a deal, AND THEN asks his siblings for permission. Shirley declares that he’s a phony since he never saw or heard anything in Hill House, yet uses their experiences and their mother’s mental illness to make a buck. She refuses any money he offers from the book sales. The others secretly agree to the money and later harp on Steve for using their pain to become famous. Theo even points out what he got wrong in book because (fanfare please) HE NEVER ASKED THEM WHILE WRITING IT!
He should have interviewed them. Written it with their help. Gotten the facts and permission first. However, nope. Steve was going to do what Steve was going to do. He does learn his lesson after that to a point. He starts interviewing people, asking if they will let him tell their stories of ghosts and terrors. He writes his books in such a way to feel like he believes in what he writes. That being said, Steve is so dismissive of what others believe he makes people feel bad about seeing ghosts.
When the family returns to the house, it feeds on each of their insecurities. For Steve it’s his writing and how he betrayed his family.
“Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about are real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real, but not to you, is it? Not until you chew it up and digest it and you shit it out on a piece of paper. And even then, it’s a pale imitation at best.” A version of Steve’s wife in his head says this when the house is trying claim him. Seems to me that Hill House was not a fan of the book. Who knew houses could read?
