A while back, I watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix.  I usually find it difficult to sift through all various television that is on these days, and, having been bitten by a few that were supposed to be good (I’m looking at you American Horror Story), I was initially wary of The Haunting of Hill House.  The problem is that I’m a huge fan of haunted house stories and I’ve seen a lot of them (good and bad), but I’m also limited in my television time, so for it to be worth that time, it has to be good.

That being said, The Haunting of Hill House was good.  There are plenty of spoilers after the jump, but that’s how I do my full reviews.

One thing that The Haunting of Hill House did right was tell two distinct stories – there was the story of the innocent family moving into the house plagued by ghosts, and there was the family drama story where everyone’s imperfections are a reason for nitpicking.  However, it does so without mixing the two together – it’s the same set of characters, but they’re separated by time.  Done this way, it makes their haunting seem horrible, and their initial escape from the house feel good.  It gives their drama meaning, since it feels like the house changed them into the people we see later in life.  Later, when they find themselves back at the house and must reconcile, it feels genuine and deserved; we want them to be a family again and not be the broken group that they had become.

Another area that The Haunting of Hill House really showed a mastery of the style was in its dialogue.  Too often for me, TV dialogue falls flat because it comes across as fake: irrational (I’m yelling at you because I need to yell), unheard (I’m not listening to what you’re saying), and Monty-Python-esque (This is an argument, no it isn’t, yes it is, etc).  The dialogue in Hill House though managed to feel really like two people with issues trying to communicate them.  The characters seemed like they thought about what they were going to say, how they were going to say it, and did so with intent.  Meanwhile, those words had impact on the other characters, whether they wanted to be impacted or not (sometimes explicitly so).  This interplay between characters through their dialogue made it feel both more real and more meaningful.

Lastly, the writing and direction demonstrated that the people behind the show knew what they were doing with a horror show.  For me, this was the critical difference between The Haunting of Hill House and American Horror Story – it was clear that these writers knew the horror tropes and how to use them for effective storytelling.  That’s not to say they used all the tropes all the time, rather, they knew when and how to use them and when and how to subvert them to tell a great horror story.

Overall, I really liked The Haunting of Hill House; in many ways it restored a bit of faith that horror isn’t just slashers, gore, and jump scares in this day in age.  To see a horror story this powerful told in a television format really raised the bar for what is considered good, and what is just passable.