The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix (Spoilers)

(yeah yeah, I get the analogy of how it was her being ignored by her family so she kills herself etc but still...)

not to carp on too much about the ending, but this sums up my thoughts exactly:

The ending is terrible - the house is meant to be a deranged, corrupting force on people, and those that end up there are lost, tortured beings. it's not an afterlife day care. All of a sudden the threat of the house is handwaved away

i was fine with nell's speech, and liv and er the dad's scene, but once the dudleys showed up it was downhill all the way. "oh no our child is dead! oh she still exists as a ghost in the house, that's cool just don't burn it down, thx!" and yes who were all the the other ghosts and how did they get there? shirley jackson spinning in her grave at the last line (delivered over the worst old man hat song).

is it true that nothing inside the house itself ever actually hurt anyone?

nell was killed (not suicide!) and forced to haunt her own past, liv was driven mad (pretty clearly suggested this was the house's doing), made to kill abigail and herself; all the others were presumably due a similar fate until nell saved them. old man hill forced to entomb himself...

the end was the one sour note, otherwise it was definitely a good show. the bent-neck lady was a classic scary figure, her ultimate explanation was next level.

Flanagan thread about episode 6

I've gotten a lot of questions about ep 106 of @haunting . Netflix released an awesome little BTS video, but for those that want more information, here's a little thread: Episode 6 was part of the very first pitch for the show, promising an episode that would look like one shot.

— Mike Flanagan (@flanaganfilm) November 4, 2018

I still maintain that the house was not inherently evil but was rather a receptacle for malevolent spirits. Another reason why which occurred to me: the Dudleys only avoided the house at night rather than cutting out altogether.

The jump scare in the car in the second to last episode is one of the best I've seen in anything in a long, long time.

the thread about ep 6 is wild, thanks for that

luckily some people noticed, all that effort went right past me!

The jump scare in the car in the second to last episode is one of the best I've seen in anything in a long, long time.

that was good, also the one in an earlier episode when the dad is comforting the girls after the hammering on the walls and suddenly goes full demon.

I've heard lots of ppl say they didn't notice the long takes, which is the surest sign that they were well-conceived. Usually they're super ostentatious and make a point of calling attention to the technique.

I for sure noticed. I was increasingly impressed with Flanagan as the series progressed (having never seen any of his other stuff) but that was the point where I was like, 'this kid is going places.'

The jump scare in the car in the second to last episode is one of the best I've seen in anything in a long, long time.

― Plinka Trinka Banga Tink (Eliza D.), Monday, November 5, 2018 8:35 AM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My gf often yelps when we're watching scary stuff but she SCREAMED and jumped out of her seat when that happened. So yeah, very well done.

i think i did notice some tracking shots, in particular the dad walking from the funeral home to the house. assumed it was cgi obv.

(PS There is a v impressive super long take action sequence in the new season of Daredevil for those who are fans of long takes and don't hate superheroes.)

It took me a few minutes into the episode, but by the time Hugh walked from the funeral home into Hill House while looking for the bathroom I was like, "Wait, there haven't been any camera cuts yet, right?" and from there I got totally into it. Frankly this hour of TV put the whole technique to better use than Birdman.

The end was fine, good even, in terms of story but they fucked up the tone and way overexplained what you were supposed to take from it. Wasn't enough to ruin a great show by any means (though the song was cutting it close).

I thought the house was certainly trying to deliberately kill people as it wanted more ghosts, and was using the crazier ghosts to achieve that end. But it turned out being a ghost at Hill House isn't the absolute worst thing.

Way, way better than a movie about a ~spooky mirror~ has any right to be.

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.)

You're mad, spooky mirror is a great premise for a movie.

https://goo.gl/images/pYHVMC

http://notcoming.com/images/features/dead-of-night/4.jpg

If you like the last line I don’t know what to say. Perhaps there’s a bias among those of us who’ve seen earlier versions/read the book?

Yeah, but...again, this isn't the book. I mean, I get that it shares a title and trivial elements with its predecessors, but otherwise I don't know why you're comparing the two.

Even within the show - what happened to the house that changes it from 'walk alone'?

^^^

Not read thread yet but hopefully kid who plays young Luke has an exciting career behind him

I was talking about this at the pub and a friend of mine said how much she liked the ending! She didn't want the ending to be sad, apparently.

I dont mind a houseful of happy ghosts! But it just felt like such a WtF after the rest of the show?

same!

I think I actually muttered something like "what is this, the end of a Scrubs episode!?"

hee

Lol yeah that’s exactly what it feels like

This and Gerald’s game are the only Flanagan things I’ve seen and both have scenes that are so syrupy (in presentation as well as in conception) that you wonder if he’s taking the piss. It’s not just the ending here, the flashback of nell’s relationship with the sleep tech was like it too. In gg it’s just the ending, which comes from the book - I remember Flanagan saying in an interview “it’s not my job to fix Stephen King’s story” which uh check again cause I think you’ll find that is exactly your job. When I started watching this I found it pretty heartening that he had apparently changed his mind about unfaithful adaptations, as it might mean the dr sleep movie has a chance of actually being good, but based on this maybe he wouldn’t have come up with anything better for the last 15 minutes of gg

Just to add a note of dissent, I saw what they were doing early on in ep 6 and thought it was impressive overall but the tradeoff with the one-take thing is that some of the performances became a little, ahem, ropy, esp in the big funeral home argument

just finished this - everyone otm that huisman is terrible in this, compared to how great everyone else is, esp since the story sort of pivots around him.

the jump scare in the car when the sisters are on the way to the house scared the shit out of me!!! the most literal jump scare i've ever seen. would've been great in a movie theater.

one question: did anyone else notice the girl watching young hugh as he's breaking through the bricks to find the skeleton? when he's in profile, she's in the background, peering around the wall, and has long white hair. i read a vulture recap of that ep and the writer somehow noticed hugh's shadow was "off" (i didn't notice this) but didn't see the girl??

https://imgur.com/vHcUzaK

https://imgur.com/hy0QWUK

yeah there's about a million of those background ghosts

https://screenrant.com/haunting-hill-house-hidden-ghosts-secrets-background

lol i didn't notice any of those other ones

Wanted: extras to dress in black, hang around in the background of scenes, and change position between takes

This is the scariest ghost in the series imo:

http://ugc-01.cafemomstatic.com/gen/constrain/750/2000/70/2017/08/25/11/4b/q5/povqa1em4g.jpg

One thing about this is the way that even though it's not really an adaptation, just a riff on the concept/approach, it's haunted by the novel in interesting ways - so many things here come directly from the book but are used in completely different contexts: the lions, people being walled up, the cup of stars, there are tons. In the book none of those things have actual plot weight, they're things dreamed up by the dreamy protagonists, but there's a kind of thrill in seeing them crop up as tangible details (even though it's really just Easter egg literalism). And of course there are a shitload of direct quotes from the novel - this is why people are correct to complain about the last line being changed btw, it's completely absurd to say 'I don't know why you're comparing the two' when we're literally talking about several lines of text being lifted directly from the novel and being changed from something very good to something very bad

I’m kind of astonished at just how bad the final episode of this was. Just...wow. Megalodon-sized shark jumping.

I haven’t felt this much hate towards a piece of entertainment in years

Finally finished this, thank Christ. It felt interminable beyond the admittedly excellent episodes 5&6 and the ending - the smuggling in of a glowing afterlife, into something that was emphatically other - was cheap. You can almost imagine Jackson as one of the hidden ghosts, screaming silently into the blackness: no redemption! And this format does encourage idea that endless talking somehow stands for 'writing'. So much talking!

All that said the casting was good (even Huismans didn't offend me) and I thought the kids were particularly great.

Everybody has a dream. And, like Hill House, we must all follow our dream wherever it takes us.

Some unpleasant people became part of Hill House's dream. But it cannot be blamed for that. Hill House was a success, in the end, wasn't it?

I actually love the idea that the last 15 mins is told from the House's perspective, but I don't think that reading is seriously supported in any way

Another reason I think Jackson would shriek is that, after everything, it was (partly) about a classic hysteric: the devouring mother.

Loved the statue head turn during the storm episode and I was hoping for more statue backstory.

apparently season 2 is about the statue's troubled childhood

It's all one long take.

Would watch a horror film in one take like Russian Ark.

The ending was superb. It's about how keeping secrets affects the future. You can remain silent, thinking hiding sth will not affect your surrounding, but does influence your life. It was great.

Dowd did you listen the Heavyweight episode where he tracks down the violinist who looked at the camera and “ruined” the single take in RA?

No! I'll need to track it down. I certainly didn't notice it when I watched it. I lent the DVD to a friend of mine who died and I don't know how to ask for it back...

(from his widow, obv.)

Or did you mean the first take? That makes more sense, sorry.

A new Haunting is coming. Can you guess where it takes place? Listen closely... pic.twitter.com/vqzrd3z4NZ

— The Haunting of Hill House (@haunting) February 21, 2019