Featured TV on DVD Review: The Haunting of Hill House
October 15, 2019
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The Haunting of Hill House has nothing to do with the 1999 film, House on Haunted Hill, despite incredibly similar names. It is based on the same novel that The Haunting was based on, which also came out in 1999. Hollywood is weird like that. This show earned a lot of critical praise and even some Awards Season glory. Was I also won over by the show? Or am I one of the dissenters?
This TV show is based on the novel and it is about Hill House, named after the family that built it and not its location. In 1992, the house was bought by the Crain family, with the intention of fixing it up so they could sell it for a large profit and build their dream home. However, something went wrong. Some of this was just technical issues. The repairs were taking longer than expected. Some of this was supernatural. The show begins with Nell, the youngest of the Crain family, waking up because she saw a ghost, the Bent-Neck Lady, at the foot of her bed. Her twin, Luke, is also awake, but it is the eldest son, Steve, that gets to her first to comfort her. Their father, Hugh, arrives to get her back to sleep. It works, but we see Nell wasn’t imaging things.
Flash forward to the present day and the now adult Steven, who is an author. In fact, he became famous by writing about the supernatural events, even though he never saw the supernatural first hand. The rest of his family is not happy about him using their trauma to get famous, especially since they had it worse. For example, Nell has been calling the rest of the family, because she’s worried about Luke, who has been dealing with addiction issues his whole life. When she calls Shirley, the way she talks makes Shirley more worried about Nell than she is worried about Luke. Theo, the middle daughter, agrees with Steve that Nell is just being Nell and there’s nothing to worry about. When we finally see Nell, as she is calling her father, Hugh, there is clearly something to worry about. Hugh is so worried, that he tells Nell to go to Shirley’s immediately and that he will fly to California the next day to be with her. Nell never gets to Shirley’s. Despite Nell claiming she was at home during the call, she was actually in her car at the old Hill House. After her call with her father, she walks into the house and never comes out again.
This gets us to the end of the first episode and to the beginning of unacceptable spoilers.
I am not as impressed with this show as most critics were, although I do still like it. There are two main problems that hurt the quality of the show in my opinion. Firstly, the show relied on too many jump scares. I’ve said before that a movie can get away with one or two jump scares and after that, even if the jump scares would be effective on their own, they just begin to annoy me. The second problem is a bigger issue. The show has pacing issues. It’s ten episodes with a total running time of nearly ten hours. They could have cut that down to six and it would have been more effective. Granted, getting to know the characters is an important part of effective horror, because we have to sympathize with them for the peril to matter, but this could have been done in a more concise way. Bouncing between the two times with the characters living in the house and them as adults does add some style points, but it exasperates the pacing issue, which would have been a problem, even without the twin time lines to deal with.
On the positive side it, well, practically everything else. The acting is great and I’m not surprised half the main cast earned nominations from the Saturn Awards. The production is even better than the acting and the mood and atmosphere created by the show is simply outstanding. Had the show not relied so heavily on loud jump scares, it could have been one of the most effective horror shows I’ve seen in years. It is still effective enough that it is an easy recommendation.
There are extended “Director’s Cuts” of three episodes, each with an audio commentary track. There is also an additional audio commentary track for a non-extended episode. That’s better than most TV on DVD releases get.
The Haunting of Hill House didn’t live up to the hype, but while I thought it could be trimmed down and I wish it used less jump scares, it is still worth checking out for fans of the genre. The DVD / Blu-ray have enough extras that it is worth picking up.
The Show
Review
The Extras
The Verdict
Filed under: Video Review, Timothy Hutton, Elizabeth Reaser, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Kate Siegel, Michiel Huisman, Victoria Pedretti