Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House reveals trauma as true horror
Trauma takes the form of a memory, especially a distasteful one that’s hard to get over with. While there may be a lot of life-changing events that can happen in one’s life, trauma comes from tragic moments and stays along with the feelings associated with that memory. In the case of Netflix’s 2019 horror series, The Haunting of Hill House, it’s the fear that lingers.
Loosely based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel-of-the-same-name, The Haunting of Hill House tells the story of the Crain family that once lived in a haunted mansion in an isolated part of town. When they should have bonded like any other typical family trying to make fond memories, they instead faced the mansion’s horrors.
The series primarily focuses on the lives of five siblings and how they cope with the memory of growing up in that house. With their memory about them fleeing from the house and guided by their father, as well as the loss of their mother in the same night when they left, they begin to deal with past wounds that never seemed to heal as they cope with adulthood. Episodes alternate between their present adult selves and their childhood moments in flashbacks.
Depending on what they experienced, the siblings witnessed different kinds of horrors. For eldest son Steven Crain (played by Michiel Huisman as an adult and Paxton Singleton as a child), it is seeing his father getting injured by a machine that they used to cut the mold infestation in their basement. For eldest daughter Shirley Crain Harris (Elizabeth Reaser, Lulu Wilson), it is seeing a litter of kittens mysteriously die after they saved it from one of the mansion’s sheds.
Theodora “Theo” Crain (Kate Siegel, Mckenna Grace), who is the middle child of the family, develops psychic abilities by touching people. Then there are the twins, Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Julian Hilliard) and Nell Crain (Victoria Pedretti, Violet McGraw), with the former befriending a ghost child and the latter seeing an entity that appears in her waking nightmare which she calls the “Bent-Neck Lady.”
But from these horrors they experienced, they each had their own ways to cope. As it turns out, their ways can’t stop the trauma from getting back. Steven Crain has become a successful author when he is able to publish a book about his experiences growing up in the mansion. But even though he remains skeptical about paranormal events, occasionally believing more in the psychological consequences that ruined his parents, he receives his siblings’ backlash, particularly from Shirley, because of changing some of the details in his book.
Shirley, on the other hand, has become a control-freak, and often has reservations when discussing important matters with her husband, from whom she has two kids. Theo has learned to push people away and constantly wears gloves to avoid using her psychic abilities. For Luke, substance abuse has become his way of coping, leading him into rehab. Nell, who faces another tragedy in the death of her husband, struggles with sleep paralysis as she is often visited again by the Bent-Neck Lady.
It is interesting to note that the series, more than its paranormal elements, has depicted that trauma changes lives. Most often than not, it is for the worse. This is not only a matter of fiction, whether represented in the pages of a novel or the scenes of a series, but that of real life.
Everyone has probably gone through a bad experience that lingers in memory, and it is in coping with that memory that matters. The viewer may easily put the blame on the siblings’ parents for letting them go through this experience. But the series does not miss the reason why they had to take that route in the first place. It was their father’s job to flip houses — maintaining or improving a property by living in it before selling it to someone else at a high price. If he had given it up, how will a family of seven (their parents included) survive, especially when the job market is scarce?
The series does not lack in depicting how to address it. While in the real world, seeking professional help, whether from a therapist or a counselor, will do, the series traces solutions straight from relationship. An episode showing the family returning to the house as adults has underscored its primary message — the first thing to overcome it is to accept that it happened and to know that one is not alone in dealing with it. For the siblings, their experiences in the paranormal become their trauma. But acknowledging it, as well as listening to each other, becomes an effective solution to address the problem.
For this reason, Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House is one of the streaming services’ gems that does not limit its scope within the genre but delivers a message that helps one to cope with past traumas, whether paranormal or not.
