At the time of this writing, the Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House carries an 8.8 rating on IMDB. It’s a ten-episode adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel of the same name, and tells the story of a family who moves into Hill House to flip it, finds ghosts inside, and is traumatized for decades afterward. Critics called it “essential viewing,” “often stunning,” and a “non-stop thrill ride.”
Like the horror film Get Out, I can’t help but wonder what Hill House‘s fans actually watched, because what I saw was horrible, tedious trash filled with every narrative cliche imaginable.
The performances were unremarkable, but the speechifying from just about every character was notable for its appalling self-indulgence. Once, twice, or more per episode, one character or another would just launch into a bland, affect-less speech that ate up time in a presentation that was six hours longer than it needed to be. You could walk the dog, wash your hands, and grab a fudgsicle from the freezer and still not miss anything during those endless speeches. They just went on and on and on.
What didn’t help was that every one of the characters was entirely unlikable. Substituting bickering for conflict, they sniped at each other endlessly, making them generally unpleasant to watch. Hugh Crain as the patriarch was an ineffectual buffoon, played with all the intensity of a doorknob by both Henry Thomas and Timothy Hutton (who tried to put me out of a job once; I’ll tell you about that some day). Carla Gugino as his wife Olivia pranced about the house in robes and wedges, too substantial to be fragile, too irritating to be tragic. The other characters, their children, filled their roles exactly the way they were written: unable to evoke even the slightest pathos.
Thematically, it follows today’s standard horror trope of Us vs. Them, not Good vs. Evil. The protagonists were motivated by survival rather than moral imperative, and the antagonists weren’t all evil: they’re just eking out undead existences in a haunted house. Christianity is specifically derided as being of no more importance than Buddhism. There’s no God, there’s no Devil, there’s just people and ghosts. Despite that the story’s about the spirits of dead people annoying/haunting/killing the living, the idea of an afterlife isn’t addressed. And, most importantly, there’s no reason given for anything that happens in the movie. Why is the house haunted? I don’t know. Why does anyone who dies in the house haunt it? Got me. Why couldn’t any of the characters do the right and moral thing by having the house torn down? Because ghosts, that’s why. Enjoy the show. There’s lesbians in it. And family drama.
I’d be tempted to write off the massive wave of love for this waste of time as paid studio shills, but I’ve seen enough people rave about it on social media to convince me that the appreciation for The Haunting of Hill House is genuine. Which is unfortunate, because it shows that the gap between garbage and quality has become so wide that it’s pretty damned difficult to accept media recommendations anymore.
Writer Amy Shannon
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The comic relief of the Movable Deceased couple was a little jarring, but the later conversation with Marcus in the trailer revealed a lot when it comes to the show’s theme. When Cherry Rego says to Marcus, “A priest with a gun,” Marcus comes back with, “An exorcist with a gun.” Lacking context, this might be a veiled reference to Marcus’s excommunication, but that’s not the case here: the show is creating a distinct difference between the role of a priest and the role of an exorcist, and it’s only because Marcus has left the clergy of the Catholic Church that he can answer his true calling as an exorcist. He’s no Father Karras, let alone a Father Merrin. He’s not even a priest anymore, but that’s a good thing, because the Catholic Church is “compromised,” a fact confirmed by the Abbess.
Episode 2
Sibling rivalry was the other big theme of this episode, though it’s hard to take it seriously when the show has given us so little reason to care about what happens to Casey or Kat. Casey’s change from nice girl to malicious possessed doesn’t work: we didn’t see her enough in the beginning for the transformation to evoke much pathos. Between her breaking the other girl’s leg in the previous episode and going completely crazy on the train molester in this episode, she comes off more like 
This episode was more focused than the 
Father Marcus says of the Bible, “Most of the words in here are man’s words, not God’s.” This gets to the heart of the problem with the show: they’re secularizing the source material. Which parts, exactly, are God’s words, then? And why didn’t those words work on the possessed homeless lady on the street? Which Biblical scholar in the production crew decided the difference between man’s and God’s words?
