The Haunting of Hill House

The Haunting of Hill House is a family drama with a haunted house in it, and the reason it worked on a scale nobody expected is that the grief is load-bearing rather than decorative.

Flanagan's structure is the achievement. The first five episodes each take one sibling, cutting between their 1992 childhood in the house and their present-day adulthood, and each one is built so that a thing you saw in a previous episode acquires a new meaning. Steven is a writer who has made money from a book about a haunting he does not believe in. Shirley runs a funeral home and controls everything she can reach. Theodora is a child psychologist who cannot touch anything without gloves. Luke is a heroin addict. Nell has sleep paralysis and has seen a woman with a broken neck at the end of her bed since she was six.

The sixth episode, "Two Storms", is the series' showpiece: a funeral home in the present and a storm in 1992, staged as a handful of extremely long takes that move between the two time periods inside the same shot, with actors swapped out behind furniture. It is a technical stunt and it is also the episode where the family finally has the argument the preceding five hours have been building.

It is scarier than its reputation among purists allows

The Tall Man in the basement. The floating man in the kitchen. Mrs Dudley's story about why she leaves before dark. The statue in the garden that is not a statue. And, in a sequence that became the most-discussed hidden detail on television, the dozens of background ghosts Flanagan placed in shots without ever cutting to them — standing in doorways, sitting in rooms, visible for a second behind a conversation.

The Bent-Neck Lady is one of the best reveals in television

It is a five-episode construction and it pays in a single cut. Nell has been seeing a woman with a snapped neck lurch towards her, in her bedroom, in a car, at a hospital, since childhood. Episode five establishes what she is: she is Nell, at the moment of her own death on the spiral staircase, flung backwards and forwards through her own life by the house. The line she delivers — that there is no between for her, that it is all now, all at once — reframes every earlier appearance as a woman watching herself be frightened by herself.

Where it goes soft

The last twenty minutes. Flanagan gives the surviving siblings a coda of recovery, reconciliation and voiceover that is tonally at odds with everything before it, and a house that has eaten three people is left standing with the family at peace. Jackson's novel ends on a woman driving into a tree and a paragraph that closes a loop; this ends on a wedding toast. It is the single most criticised decision in the series and the criticism is fair.

It is not the novel

Almost nothing is carried over except the title, the house, five character names and the themes. Eleanor Vance, Dr Montague, Theodora as a guest, the four-person experiment and the ambiguity are all absent. Treated as an adaptation it is a failure; treated as its own thing it is the best American horror series of its decade.

For the book it borrows from and does not adapt, The Haunting of Hill House; for Flanagan's later and better series, Midnight Mass; for the same family-grief-as-haunting structure at feature length, Hereditary and Oculus.

The short answer: Luke goes back to Hill House to burn it down and the house takes him. The others follow. Inside, each of them is given the Red Room in the form they most want — Theo's dance studio, Shirley's family room, Steven's study, Luke's treehouse — and sedated by it. Hugh gets them out by making a bargain: he offers himself to the house in Luke's place. He dies there, and remains, with Olivia and with Nell. The four surviving siblings walk out at dawn. Hill House stands, unburned, with the family's dead in it; the closing voiceover has Steven reading his own book's opening lines back with their meaning changed, and the siblings in the present having rebuilt their lives — Luke two years sober, Theo in a relationship, Shirley reconciled with her husband, Steven's marriage repaired.

Who is the Bent-Neck Lady?

Nell. The figure with the broken neck that has terrorised her since she was a child is her own corpse, at the moment of her death on the spiral staircase at Hill House, unstuck in time and dragged through every frightening moment of her own life. The reveal is staged as a single cut at the end of episode five: Nell falls, the rope catches, and the series shows her looking down at herself as a child in the bed she has just left. Her explanation — that for her there is no "then", that it is all happening at once — is the series' only real piece of cosmology.

What is the Red Room in Hill House?

The locked room at the centre of the house, which Flanagan describes through a character as its stomach. It appears to each person as the room they most need and will not leave: Olivia's reading room, Theo's dance studio, Shirley's family room, Luke's treehouse, Nell's toy room, Steven's study. Every family member has already spent long periods inside it without knowing. The series reveals this as a single rotation of one space, and the detail that none of them could open the same door is the best idea in it.

Why does Olivia Crain die?

Because the house works on her through Poppy Hill, one of its dead, who persuades her that the only way to protect her children from the world is to make sure they never wake up. Olivia drugs tea with rat poison intending to kill Nell and Luke; Abigail Dudley — the caretakers' daughter, whom the Crain children believed was imaginary — drinks it instead and dies. Olivia then falls from the Red Room balcony. Hugh takes the children off the property that night and spends twenty-six years refusing to explain why.

Who are the ghosts in Hill House?

The house's accumulated dead, most of them Hills: William Hill, the Tall Man in the basement with his hat; his wife Poppy, who was committed and who is the house's most active agent; their daughter Hazel; the bowler-hatted figure the children call the floating man; Abigail Dudley; and eventually Olivia, Nell and Hugh. Flanagan also seeded dozens of unremarked background ghosts into ordinary shots across all ten episodes, which the series never acknowledges.

How faithful is it to Shirley Jackson's novel?

Barely at all. It keeps the title, the house, and the names Hugh, Luke, Theodora, Eleanor and Mrs Dudley, and it keeps the themes of a place that finds the weakest person in it. Everything else — the Crain family, the five-sibling structure, the Red Room, the Bent-Neck Lady, the 1992 timeline, the ending — is invented. Jackson's novel is about four strangers in an experiment and ends in a suicide; the series is about one family and ends in a reconciliation.

Does Hill House get destroyed at the end?

No. Luke goes there intending to burn it and fails; the house is standing in the final episode and nothing in the series suggests it has stopped. The siblings simply leave, having lost their father to it on top of their mother and their sister. The series' closing line, about a house that is not sane, is borrowed from Jackson and is the one place the ending's optimism is undercut.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 018 is deep into the supernatural — only 14 works score lower. Nobody in the family harms anybody except under the house's direction, and the series has no human antagonist at all.

Pace 022 is very slow — 25 works are slower. Ten hours, five of them structured as character studies, with the incident concentrated in episodes five, six and ten.

Viscera 025 is low — 25 works score lower. A hanging, a fall, a poisoning, a self-inflicted wound in a bathtub, and almost no blood.

Era bias 088 reads modern — 91 works score lower. Digital capture, very long takes made possible by digital, a 2018 grade, and a streaming structure that assumes you will watch ten hours.

Tone 020 is bleak — 54 works score lower, which is worth stating against the series' reputation for a warm ending: a mother, a daughter and a father all die in the house, and the coda does not undo any of it.

Reality anchor 040 is grounded — 26 works score lower. The house's geography is mostly consistent, and only the Red Room and Nell's timeline bend.

On jump scares: several, and the bent-neck figure at the foot of a bed is the most effective of them.