I'm Sadie Gennis and I'm here to tell you what the just f*ck happened in "The
Haunting of Hill House." Mike Flanagan's hit Netflix series is an
adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel of the same name, but it has a completely
different plot and cast of characters and is told across two timelines. The
show follows the Crane family, who move into the super creepy Hill House and
become subjected to the whims of the house and all of the ghosts who lived
there. Driven mad by the house, the mother, Olivia, attempts to kill her two youngest
children, Nell and Luke, but is prevented from doing so by her husband, Hugh. Years
later, Nell finds herself drawn back to Hill House, where she dies. Her family is
initially torn whether or not it was suicide or if Nell is another victim of
the house. Spoiler alert: it was NOT suicide. It's time to wake up,
sweetheart. Although it's a haunted house show, it's
really a story about grief and trauma and the five Crane siblings actually
represent the five stages of grief. The eldest, Steven, is obviously denial with
him refusing to believe in the supernatural, despite all of the mounting
evidence. Shirley is anger with all of her self-righteous grudges. Theo is
bargaining, as she tries to negotiate with her pain. Luke is depression, as he
tries to escape his feelings through heroin. Nell is acceptance with her coming
to terms with her tragic fate. A lot of things about Hill House remain super
mysterious, but here's everything we know about the house. Unlike in the novel,
Hill House is named after the family that built it and not the hills that
surrounded it. Hill House was built by the Hill family in the early 20th
century. Mike Flanagan had actually written an entire history of the
construction of Hill House, including details on all of the Hills, but sadly,
that all had to be cut for time. Fortunately, one of the show's writers
allegedly has been posting stories about all of the Hill family ghosts on Reddit,
which reveal a ton about all of these characters. Hazel Hill, that creepy old
lady in the bedroom, was the one who was the bootlegger who had been operating
out of the basement, and Poppy and William's daughter, Jacqueline, who was
the famous owner of that Cup of Stars, was drowned in cement in the houses
foundation by Hazel. That's super f*cked up. I'm really glad that actually got cut from
the show. As for that random burned ghost in the basement that went after Luke,
that was apparently Hazel's son, Edward. The boy in the wheelchair is confirmed
to be Poppy's son and apparently, his name's Eugene. Who knew? He's just like, that kid's just
like, a weenie though, you know? Just because, he's just like always lurking
around, like...just, like, what do you want? You know? Hazel and Poppy were the last
surviving Hills and they seemingly died of natural causes, but maybe they also
died from all of that hate festering between them.
She's a liar. One of the questions people keep asking is whether or not Hill House was
created evil or if it was just made evil by all of these crazy Hills living in it.
I talked to creator Mike Flanagan about this and he told me that Hill House is
definitively insane. It also acts like a prism refracting elements of people's
personalities, and so I think it pretty much picked up on all of that like
craziness and murder and anger. Let's talk about the f*cking red room. This is not the
heart of the house, it is the stomach and it's appetite is insatiable. What makes
the red room super, super creepy is that it turns itself into exactly what the
victims desire, a treehouse, a reading room, a dance studio, and so it lulls you
into this false sense of security, while it feeds off you and eventually kills
you. We see this in Olivia trying to protect her children by killing them and
also in William Hill, getting his wish to finally be a super tall dude, but only
after dying, having buried himself, like, into the wall of the house. The thing is,
if you die in Hill House, you're trapped there for all eternity, which some of the
ghosts seem to dig and others not so much, but the most important part is that
not everyone is corrupted by Hill House. As Mike Flanagan told me, just like
people react to grief in different ways, people react to the house in different
ways, but every single member of the Crane family is affected. No one is
immune, but certain people, like Liv, do appear to be far more vulnerable and
more appetizing to the house, and after all of this darkness, the show pulled the
biggest twist of all and gave us an actual hopeful
ending, which was pretty polarizing to a lot of fans. In the finale, the surviving
Crane siblings find themselves trapped in the Red Room, where they're faced with
these manifestations of their greatest guilt, but then Nell comes in and saves
them and even though all of her siblings kind of blame themselves for her death,
she gives this beautiful speech that had me just, like, sobbing about how that all
that really matters is she loved them completely and they loved her back. The
rest is confetti. I can't! I can't, Aaron! I can't! It's so sweet! But because this
is Hill House, it can't have, like, a super rosy happy ending and so in order for
the kids to actually make it out of Hill House alive, Hugh offers to sacrifice
himself to Olivia and stay there with her and Nell, so that she'll let her
children go. It is heartbreaking, but very sweet. Thanks to Hugh's sacrifice, Olivia
lets her kids leave and they wind up building these beautiful, happy lives.
Steve gets over his fear of having children. Shirley comes clean about her
one-night stand. Luke marks two years sober and Theo
takes off her gloves and actually lets herself have real human intimacy. It was
beautiful. As a big fan of the book, I was not expecting this at all because
Shirley Jackson's novel has one of the most cynical endings I have read in a
while. Mike Flanagan originally wrote a much darker ending that was more in line
with the cynical one from the book. That scene where all of the Cranes are
together celebrating was gonna be revealed to actually be inside the Red
Room, which would have been devastating, but then Mike Flanagan fell in love with
the characters while they were making the show and decided it would have been
too cruel to do that and that they had earned these, like, two minutes of
happiness after those 10 hours of just trauma and grief that we had all endured
together. I would call it a happy ending because when you go into a horror thing,
a happy ending means not everyone f*cking dies, but it is a hopeful ending and an
optimistic ending. It's an ending that is filled with promise and opportunities
and room to grow and heal and I think that's what a lot of people like to
imagine is possible, and so that's why I like to
think of it as a happy ending. These contradictions between the tragedies and
the healing are the point. The Dudleys are able to reunite with their kids in
the afterlife at the cost of their Christian belief in heaven. The Crane
siblings are able to come together as a family in a way they hadn't in 20 years,
thanks to their father's sacrifice. The house is evil, but it can also be a gift
and contradictions like this are really uncomfortable, but that's exactly what
makes this ending so powerful because that's exactly how life works. Even the
biggest fans of the show though have so many burning questions, so I'm gonna do
my best to answer the main ones here. So, one of the main things people keep
having questions about is how the house can hunt the Cranes when they're outside
the house. At first, we think that Hugh is with the spirit of his dead wife
constantly, but then it's later confirmed that that is not actually the ghost of
Olivia and it's just this manifestation that Hugh created in his own head to
help himself cope with everything. If you remember early in the season, Olivia
tells her kids that when they see the porch light flicker, it's time to come
home, and we actually see throughout the show lights flickering and calling the
Crane siblings back to Hill House. Even though it's absolutely terrifying to
have a ghost show up at your home or, like, at their own funeral, it really
seems like Nell wasn't trying to scare her siblings, but give them messages. That
jump-scare in the car in particular, yeah, scared the sh*t out of me, but it seemed
like she was just trying to stop her sisters from fighting. All of the
siblings are being haunted by different ghosts, but Shirley's being haunted by a
manifestation of the guy she had that one night stand with. James Lafferty is
not dead, but he's still a ghost in this universe. Stephen's line at the end of the
series really sums up what ghosts are and how they sort of exist in this
universe. Ghosts aren't guilt. Ghosts are secrets. Ghosts are regrets of
failings, most times supposed as a wish If you're still really hung up on how
the house was able to haunt them when they're outside the house,
think of the house as body metaphor, where the walls that the Cranes built within
themselves not only trapped their own guilts and shame and secrets, but it also
trapped part of the house in there with them. So wherever they went, they carried
part of Hill House with them, enabling the hauntings to follow them, even when
they were far away. Now, let's talk about Father of the Year, Hugh. A lot of people
are wondering why everyone else got a red room and he didn't. There is a theory
that the house did kind of give Hugh his own ideal Red Room. The way the Red Room
works is that it plays off what you most desire in order to keep you in the house,
and so Hugh, who's obsessive about fixing things, was presented with this problem
he couldn't solve, the water damage, because he couldn't get into the Red
Room, the source of it. This not only kept the family in Hill House longer, but
really satiated Hugh's sort of need to always be fixing things and being, like,
the problem solver, and for anyone asking if Abigail was dead the whole time,
no! She was alive. She was a happy, weird, cute, sheltered child, but she was
definitely alive. The real mystery there is who the hell took her hand after she
died? That's probably something that would have been revealed in the whole
history of Hill House that Mike Flanagan had originally intended to include, but
for now, I'm going with the theory that it's actually Mrs. Dudley's
mother-in-law. We knew she worked at the house, maybe she died there too, and that
would explain why she was so keen on taking on Abigail right away. Some people
also wonder if all of the Cranes have supernatural abilities, but it really
just seems like it runs through the women in the family.
We know that Olivia is sensitive, as she put it, and it seems that when she had
her daughter, she sort of passed slivers of that on to them. We know Theo
has the touch, Shirley has the dream sleeve and Nell can see across time.
These abilities and this sort of, like, heightened sensitivity is probably what
made Nell and Olivia, in particular, so desirable to the house and why it
latched on to them so strongly. One of the most unnerving parts of the
finale was when Poppy Hill went up to Hugh Crane and started saying that
creepy song about the Groton family and how every single member just met this
horrible death. He came up close behind him and
strangled him with wire. But the story behind that song may actually be
creepier than the song itself. That Groton lullaby is taken straight from
the book, where it was taken straight from Shirley Jackson's actual life. I
love Shirley Jackson, but she actually used to sing that song to her children
as a lullaby, which totally creeps me out a bit. Obviously, one of the most
confusing questions the show left viewers with was how the f*ck time works, but
I'm gonna let Nell herself explain that one. Our experiences fall around us. We
are not alone. The Haunting of Hill House would argue when you're standing on a
corner in the rain and you think of someone you love, they're with you in
that moment. So even if they're gone in this, in this world, that they are still
with you. But obviously, the biggest question on
fans' minds right now is whether or not there's gonna be a season two and it's
kind of up in the air. The one thing we know for sure is that Mike Flanagan has
said that the Crane story is done, so even if the show were to return, we
wouldn't be seeing them again because frankly, the Cranes have been through
enough, but the show could continue on as an
anthology, focusing on different haunted places and haunted people. Personally, I
don't really want a season two. I think season one is perfect as is and we need
to let things go, but I know I'm in the minority here, so let us know whether or
not you want a season two in the comments.