When it comes to horror, I generally like to fall back on the cliché: "I'm a pusher, not a user." Truthfully, I consider the stuff I write to be more in line with dark fantasy (or just fantasy) than horror, but I also think that the genres (along with sci fi) exist in a sort of spectrum or multidimensional graph. I think the monsters in fantasy should feel like they're out of a horror story, because the fantasy is that there exists an equal or greater force for good that can stand and oppose them.
But I've always been drawn to that darker side of things, while at the same time I'm a total lightweight when it comes to actually enduring horror. Perhaps more than any other genre (except perhaps cringe comedy,) horror is one that is endured and not simply enjoyed. There's a pride viewers get from watching scary movies - a kind of bragging rights - that feels a bit akin to people who like the very spiciest foods. There's almost a joy in being able to disparage those who don't like it. (At 35, my mouth still really likes spicy foods but my stomach and intestines are not such big fans anymore.)
So, I've always been in this kind of weird place when it comes to horror. I really enjoy the mystery and intrigue that often comes with it - the sense that there's a bigger picture to put together, threaded together with hints and glimpses. But I also hate actually feeling scared. I have an active imagination, and unless I'm unusual, I think adults don't so much get over their childhood fear of the dark so much as they just learn to manage it.
So color me impressed, I guess, that I've managed to get this far into the Haunting of Hill House. I watched the first episode weeks ago, but finally started early enough in the evening that I was able to get through three episodes before I cut myself off for the night.
Ghost stories are one of the (and maybe the most elemental) subgenres of horror. I think basically every human culture has a concept of ghosts, because I think every human culture struggles to reckon with death. People exist, and all of a sudden their bodies cease to be a conscious, sentient entity that you can relate to and become inanimate objects. On a deep level, it's almost as if we have an internalized sense of the conservation of matter and energy - whatever the person's animating force was that made them them, the "person" of them, has gone missing. So, we think, where might it have gone?
That can apply both to villainous individuals and to loved ones we miss, which makes the concept very fertile for different kinds of horror.
I think of all horror subgenres, ghost stories are the ones most aligned with talking about grief. On a metaphorical level, the people we lose haunt us. And sometimes, the unresolved aspects of those relationships mean tensions that we can never unravel.
It's been nearly five years since my mother died of cancer. Five years is simultaneously a yawning chasm of time and also the blink of an eye. Our current historical moment - at what is (knock on wood) hopefully the later stages of a bona fide plague - has made the last two years feel temporally distorted. For me, I'd say I'm in that stage where the grief is still tender, like the scars on my wrists after I put my arms through a window when I was 6, but there's also a post-"my mother is alive" routine that my family has developed. I wanted my mom to live to be 100 or more, but I wasn't exactly a child when she died, having turned 31 a few weeks earlier.
The Haunting of Hill House is a loose adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel. It tells the story of five siblings whose mother died while they were living at the eponymous house back in the 1990s when they were kids (this might be the first thing I've seen when the "adults looking back to their childhood" sort of story feels strongly like it's my generation). The house was haunted, though the memories of the strange things happening there varied greatly between the kids - all they know is that one night, their dad woke them up and got everyone (except the mother) into the family car to drive away.
The structure of the first several episodes follows the various siblings and the way that this trauma has shaped their lives. Steven struggled as an author for years until he wrote a highly fictionalized version of their family trauma, and has become a big success in the "non-fiction" ghost story genre, even if he's a skeptic himself, having never seen any of the things that his siblings claim to have. Shirl (short for Shirley, and surely that name cannot be a coincidence - I assume Steven is named for Stephen King, who does often have authors as protagonists in his stories) has become a mortician, running a funeral home and clearly seeing embalming and her craft as a way to fix (and control) death. Theo, the middle child, is a child psychologist, helping kids deal with trauma, though with her episode we start to get a bit of a broadening of the scope of the show's supernatural elements. The most recent I watched is that of Luke, one half of the pair of twins that are the youngest in the family, along with his sister Nell. Luke always struggled with being talked down to and disbelieved, and in adulthood he became a drug addict, giving his family another reason not to take him seriously.
The structure works very effectively to show the complex tapestry of this family and the way that it was shaped by trauma.
What's interesting to me is that the show seems entirely uninterested in the meaning or source of the haunting of the eponymous house itself. Oftentimes, ghost stories (especially of the haunted house variety) will require its protagonists to solve the mystery of the ghosts haunting the house in order to prevail and bring peace.
Here, however, four episodes in, the show is far more interested in exploring these characters and the different ways that grief can manifest - even while scaring the shit out of you with its ghosts.
It is very good. But fair warning, if you've experienced any period of acute grief, you're going to see a lot of familiar feelings, so take care of yourself if you're going to watch it.
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