The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix (Spoilers)

And ya Simon it was uncanny. The child/adult casting of Shirley also was craaaazy

Bly Manor's out Friday; getting mostly encouraging reviews.

also, lots more Victoria Pedretti and no Michael Huisman seems like an immediate, obvious improvement

most of the reviews seem to be saying "not as scary" which is slightly concerning given Flanagan's soppier instincts

as long as there's no tacked-on happy ending this time I would be fine with that tbh

Why is he talking about having the rights to all of James’ supernatural stories? Surely James is out of copyright??

some of M.R. James' stuff was published after he died and is thus still copyrighted

(Casting the Runes and Whistle and I'll Come For You are both public domain though!)

This is Henry James though

Kinda wish I'd known that going in. I kept being like 'this...really reminds me of The Innocents'. Lo and behold.

his name is pasted all over the credits!

Watched the first two eps - digging the super chill pacing and the mood-over-scares approach. Also lol @ the dodgy accents juxtaposed with actual English actors

ooh need to watch Bly Manor thx for reminder

Peter Quint's is quite possibly the worst fake Scottish accent I've ever heard.

Oh God, just reached his part - it's awful.

ok, 5 eps in and really digging this so far despite the hilarious accent work. really more of a gothic romance vibe than horror but that's totally fine by me.

Yeah, the noble accents of the British Isles are being mauled all over the shop in this. Four episodes in and enjoying it though, fewer obvious chills than Hill House but still engrossing and, er, haunting.

I ended up liking this less than Hill House despite the ending being less of a shitshow, but I'll hold off on saying more till other people weigh in who've watched the entirety.

i’m 4 eps in and I like it but the accents are driving me up a wall

Quint makes me want to mute the tv

Even the accents by UK actors sound a bit weird.

it's really too bad because the perf and characterization are otherwise quite effective imo

bly house lost me by the end idk, it did some things well but couldve been condensed; i havent watched hill house but i prob will eventually

the biggest problem for me was that the dani/jamie relationship ending up as the central one felt wrong; that pairing never clicks, mostly due to cliched and/or vague writing and a lack of chemistry btwn the actors

I ended up liking this less than Hill House despite the ending being less of a shitshow

agree with this and the bit behind your spoiler tag. Hill House was good throughout but flubbed the ending, whereas this one I think peaked with the Hannah episode (ep 5), which I thought was fantastic and heartbreaking and tied all the different plot strands together really well.

Overall, I found the season both overstuffed and overlong - feels like it could have ended an episode earlier and nothing much would have been missed. At the same time, several of the stories didn't seemed fleshed out enough e.g. whether Dani ever really dealt with her guilt over her ex-fiance's death; or why Rebecca, someone who seemed otherwise smart and reasonable, could be so easily taken in by Peter Quint not once but multiple times. She seemed like an underwritten character.

Btw, I know there's another Rebecca film on Netflix right now but I thought Ms Jessel was a nice homage to Du Maurier's Rebecca, who also haunts her replacement and likes to hang out in the west wing. 

re: Rebecca/Peter, Rebecca was definitely underwritten but, I mean, smart women are taken in by handsome creeps all the time!

I hope the Owen and Hannah actors get folded into future Flanaganverse things. The kids were uncannily good at times as well.

getting your wish sooner rather than later - Rahul Kohli who plays Owen is on Flanagan's new series Midnight Mass https://www.slashfilm.com/midnight-mass-production/

Did you watch iZombie, Simon? He's great and fun in that too.

holy shit that was HIM????

I only saw s1 of that so maybe I'd kinda forgotten about him.

yeahhh Dr Ravi Chakrabarti! <3

the plot got too complicated after a while, but iirc he really comes into his own in the later seasons when the show started to focus more on the rest of the ensemble and not just on Liv.

i'm only five episodes into bly manor, there are a few annoying things about it and many good things about it, but my main reaction is "gay! gayyyyyy. gay. gaaaaay"

i never notice when accents are bad and it's for the best that i'm never told about it

the ending isn't bad but after the climax ends the last episode just wanders through a long boring coda. they should've just added twenty minutes to episode 8

otherwise i found that very enjoyable, though: why was this set in the '80s

i also have yet to see hill house, which i'm gonna start right away

it's amazing how much i loved the gay shit until it became super corny and the entire fucking focus

yeah, incorrect central relationship for sure

I personally got a huge kick out of drunk henry vs evil henry but this does not seem to be universally agreed upon

oh i liked that episode a lot

amazed that no one at the framing device party was like "why did you tell that story in a super weird way"

I liked that "If you go back and watch the series again, in every episode there’s probably somewhere between eight and 10 ghosts that are just hidden in plain sight that we called no attention to but they’re there"

it is truly "shit moving in the background: the show"

i love it tbh

I totally didn't get the framing device. Like Flora wasn't like, who are you and why are you at my wedding? And why do parts of this story seem familiar. And the older version of the cook and older henry just being like, sure, tell this story, you know the one we made a big deal out of the kids not remembering, definitely no chance this will jog any memories.

it was sooo silly

idk what the general reception of episode eight was but i kinda thought the diversion into the origins of the haunting was really well-done and at least two of the jump scares totally got me

like i basically loved this until the last 40 minutes, so much agonizing exposition just to convey that years have passed and yet the haunting persists

I would have liked ep 8 a lot better without the narration. hell, I'd have dug it more in full silent film mode, that would have been sick

yeah you’re right the narration is kinda overbearing

The narrator had an awful accent as well.

Set in the 80s so people were old in the framing device, also no mobile phones/google.

I mostly enjoyed it, the characters and story were decent. Nothing came close to the creepiness of the Bent Neck Lady, though.

This was daft but we stuck with it. The accents and clunky dialogue almost sunk the whole thing (in a lake); when Garth Merenghi gives the most convincing characterisation, you're in trouble. (Though even he was required to say "I couldn't do the math" or variations thereon, which was risible).

"I couldn't do the math" or variations thereon, which was risible

Yes! This massively bugged me as well and instantly made me think of this: https://coub.com/view/11skso