The Haunting of Hill House Is the One Everyone Keeps Telling You to Watch, and They Are Right

Right, I need to say something a bit embarrassing first. People have been telling me to watch The Haunting of Hill House for years. Proper telling me, not just mentioning it. Friends, strangers online, one man at a car boot sale who overheard me talking about horror films and turned round to insist on it. I nodded along every single time and then went home and watched something shorter instead, because ten episodes about a haunted house sounded like a lot of commitment for one evening.

I finally sat down with it on a wet Sunday with a blanket, a large coffee and absolutely no plans, and I need to apologise to every single person who told me to watch it. They were right. All of them.

What it actually is, if you have somehow avoided it

The Haunting of Hill House follows the Crain family, who lived in a huge old house for one summer when the children were small, and something happened there that none of them have ever properly recovered from. The show jumps between that summer and years later, when the siblings are grown up, barely speaking to each other, and each carrying their own version of what the house did to them. It is not really a show about jump scares, though it has a few that made me spill coffee on the sofa. It is a show about grief and families and the things nobody wants to say out loud, wrapped inside a haunted house story.

That is the bit that took me by surprise. I went in expecting a scary house with a body count. What I got was something that made me properly sad in between the bits that made me hide behind a cushion.

The bit that actually got me

Without spoiling anything, because I refuse to be the person who ruins this for someone else after years of people being kind enough not to ruin it for me, there is a single sequence part way through the series that is filmed as one continuous shot across a funeral and a house at the same time. I did not breathe properly for the whole thing. It is the kind of television that makes you understand why people study how a scene is put together, because every choice in it is deliberate and none of it is showing off for the sake of it.

The house itself is doing a lot of the work too. It has that quality the best haunted houses in fiction always have, where it feels less like a location and more like a character with its own patience. If you have ever read Shirley Jackson's original novel, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, you will recognise where a lot of that atmosphere comes from, even though the series takes the story in its own direction. I read the book afterwards rather than before, and I would honestly recommend doing it that way round. Watch the series for the family, then read the book for the house.

Why I think this belongs in the club

This is exactly the sort of thing I wanted this section of the site to be for. Not just films, because television does patient, slow burning horror in a way a two hour film often cannot afford to. A series can sit with a family for ten hours and let you actually care whether they survive each other, let alone anything supernatural. Hill House earns its scares because it earns the people first.

So if you are one of the people who has been telling me to watch this for years, you win. I owe you one. And if you are one of the people who has been putting it off the way I did, do yourself a favour, put the kettle on, get comfortable, and give it the ten hours. Just maybe do not watch the last couple of episodes alone in the dark. I did, and I do not regret it, but I also did not sleep properly for two days.

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