The Haunting of Hill House gets one important thing right about ghosts 

There are two truths one can only learn by growing up in a haunted house. The first is that you might never fully come to realize how paranormal your world really was until you leave it, as I learned at 16 years old, when my family moved out of the house I was raised in. The second is that a haunting, as well as being inconvenient and a little noisy, is a sad affair.

There are few TV shows and horror movies that articulate this experience better than The Haunting of Hill House. Hill House knows that ghosts are more than jumpscare devices and pale faces in reflected surfaces. They’re people who were left behind, with names unknown and stories untold. Ghosts are death, grief, and time – all the things that make up a haunting.

The Haunting of Hill House is stricken by death. It’s also obsessed with grief, as portrayed through the Crain children, who represent the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Grief is dictated by time and how it changes people after a traumatic event. 

This is why Mike Flanagan’s melancholic masterpiece is one of the saddest horror stories ever. I rewatch it every Halloween, and every time I do, I’m reminded of the things Hill House understood better than any of its ghoulish counterparts. 

The story of my house and the story of Hill House

Netflix

The Haunting of Hill House is a good ghost story. It’s scary, almost impossible, and just fantastical enough to be cinematic. My own ghost stories are usually served as side dishes to conventionally more frightening first courses at Halloween because they aren’t always as spooky. 

They’re stories of mild paranoia, second-guessing, and acceptance of strange household phenomena. They’re the stories of the strange woman who stood at the end of the upstairs hallway, watching my mother put on her makeup. Of the invisible figure who walked around my bedroom until the one night I asked it to “Please be quiet.” It’s the story of our ghost in the playroom, who I still haven’t figured out how to talk about yet.

The biggest lie horror movies ever told was that ghosts were creators of terror. Hill House uses the spirits to its advantage, planting some classically effective jumpscares and loud frights. But above all else, it knows that nothing is more tragic than a ghost, nor the people who experience them.

The Crain siblings react to the fabled Hill House differently, growing up under varying degrees of denial, repression, and doubt. But they’re all intensely damaged, not because of their fear but because of what their fear did to them. They’re their own worst enemies and only ever really haunted by their own past, not the ghosts that lived in it.

“Nobody could see me.”

Netflix

“I was right here…nobody could see me,” is what young Nell Crain tells her family when she seemingly disappears during a raging storm in Episode 6. Haunted by the horrifying “Bent-Neck Lady” her entire life, Nell’s tragic tale comes to a close with the revelation that she is her girlhood ghost, living through her own past after having jumped from the library staircase.

It’s one of the most tragic twists in horror and one in which you’d be hard-pressed to find an emotional match. There are few ghosts in the genre that exist outside of their initial haunting, since they’re usually banished in some action-packed ritual, or defeated with some religious deus ex machina. 

But not in Hill House. There’s no solution to Nell’s afterlife. She’s doomed to forever exist in that house with the others. Our only reprieve from her fate and the back-breaking weight of loss is the final episode in which she says goodbye to her siblings, telling them that she loved them and how nothing else mattered – a dignity rarely given to other on-screen spirits.  

“If nothing else, be kind.”

Netflix

In Hill House, the living and the dead are equally as tragic as each other. Life and the afterlife are on equal footing when it comes to pain and misery, and nobody gets off lightly. The remaining Crain siblings get a chance to start anew at the end, yes, but it comes with its costs. 

Barely a moment in the show goes by without the viewer being confronted by the Crains’ torment in either timeline. Whether it’s Luke’s hollowed hopelessness in his drug-addicted adult years or his wide-eyed innocence in his childhood, we know he’s doomed to be afraid. There’s also Theo’s baffling “gift” that causes her confusion in her youth and emotional torture in adulthood. 

Nell’s trembling fear and sleep paralysis gives her no chance to breathe; Shirley’s anger and responsibility weigh down on her, likewise for Steven’s bubbling desperation to deny, deny, deny.

Then there are the ghosts. There are so many that it’s since become a point of obsession to spot one of the many hidden figures Mike Flanagan scattered throughout the series. They’re so frequent that it’s easy to forget just how dire this reality is. How many spirits can linger in a house before it becomes a graveyard? Where else can they go? Is there a place for us to go?

“Whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Netflix

The sadness of Hill House becomes even more obvious as the Crain children grow up, when their fear becomes overtaken by other problems, and the ghosts themselves don’t seem as problematic (at least for a while). It’s because Flanagan knows something most other horror stories forget: ghosts are only scary for a moment – it’s what they represent that’s far more unshakable.

When I think about my own ghost stories and the ones I shared with others in my house, it occurs to me that nobody ever mentioned being scared. In fact, we were only really able to acknowledge the “haunting” after we’d left because it was only then we realized it had been real.

Even during times when I was alone in the house, I always felt there was someone near me. And it was only after we’d moved into a decidedly “entity-free” home that I fully understood that the atmosphere I’d experienced, while not particularly frightening, wasn’t normal. 

In the final episode of Hill House, Steven, rattled by years of rationalism and reluctance, finally comes to realize that he had, in fact, witnessed a ghost. It was harmless: a man fixing a clock, seen only in passing. It was only when his father Hugh revealed that he’d never hired someone to mend the clock that Steven understood what he’d experienced and, more importantly, that it was true.

That’s what Hill House is about. It’s not about scares or one-take episodes, or even some of the most pitch-perfect casting ever put to screen. It’s about leaving people behind. It’s about letting the things that haunt you go. 

Hill House is the only horror show I watch every year because, ultimately, it’s the only horror show that understands – as Steven says – that most times, a ghost is a wish. If you’re looking for more spooky content then check out our fill Terror-Tober schedule or check out our lists of the best zombie movies ever made and the best horror games.