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This padlet aims to highlight key components of The Haunting of Hill House so that the reader can better understand how the concepts of horror, grief and ghosts are framed in the show.

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Olivia here. Is she seeing a vision of the death of her adult children or being a victim of paranoia?

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Olivia fulfilling her wishes, for her children to "wake up" to death. 

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Olivia fulfilling her wishes, for her children to "wake up" to death. 

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Here she serves them rat poison in their tea party

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The red room transformed into Steve's video game room

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"There are more ways in, and darkness can infiltrate and take root in their lives in different ways"

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It's been nearly a month since The Haunting of Hill House hit Netflix, but fans are still deep in discussion as they attempt to parse through the complex tale of grief and ghosts. The 10-episode series left viewers with a lot of burning questions and few neatly wrapped up answers. While some may argue that the answers to the questions don't matter nearly as much as the emotional impact of the series, we there's never been a puzzle we haven't wanted to solve. Fortunately, between revealing interviews with the cast and creator Mike Flanagan, and the impressive crowd-sourcing power of Reddit, pretty much every question you can imagine has already been answered.

Since no one has time to search through the entire internet where all these answers are scattered around (like new snow or confetti, some might say), we rounded up answers to eight of the biggest burning questions below.

1. Was Hill House always evil or did the Hills make it evil? This is probably the hardest question to answer because Hill House defies all neat and logical explanation. As creator Mike Flanagan previously told us, the house "can't be held to a rational logic" and trying "to apply a sense of order and reason to [how the house affects people] is impossible." Flanagan also clarified that while the house is inherently insane, it does act as a prism "that refracts elements of people's personalities." Meaning, if someone who isn't fully sane - like Poppy (Katie Parker) - moves into Hill House, the house can pick up on these things and magnify them. So basically, trying to figure out the cause and effect between what occurred because Hill House is insane and what occurred because insane people lived in Hill House is pretty much a futile mission and you should turn back now.
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2. Who were all the other ghosts? There were a lot of ghosts running around Hill House, but we only ever really got to know Poppy Hill, the unhinged flapper who pushed Olivia ( Carla Gugino) over the edge. However, Flanagan had written and originally planned to shoot a complete history of the house that would have introduced us to several of the other figures haunting Hill House's halls. In lieu of that, though, one of the show's writers has allegedly been posting stories about the Hill ghosts on Reddit. If we take those stories as canon, then we now know that Hazel Hill was the bootlegger who operated out of the basement; the burned ghost in the basement was Hazel's son Edward; Hazel killed Poppy's daughter Jacqueline by drowning her in the cement of the house's foundation; Poppy's son in the wheelchair is named Eugene; the tall man in the bowler hat is Poppy's husband William; and that the wife of Jacob Hill, who built the house, died during construction, which may have caused some of the bad energy infecting the house.

3. Why does Theo have powers? Theo's ( Kate Siegel) ability - to pick up on information and emotion through touch - has nothing to do with her time at Hill House. She inherited the ability from Olivia, who seems to have inherited her powers from her own mother. It seems as though the Crain women are able to pass down supernatural abilities through the generations, but with each woman getting a different splinter of power. Olivia says her mother was "sensitive," like Theo, and Olivia's own powers were made clear when she shared the story of the time she made it rain stones as a child. According to Flanagan, Nell ( Victoria Pedretti) inherited the ability to look across time from Olivia, while Shirley ( Elizabeth Reaser) got the dream sleep, which explains her premonition about "dancing in the red room" while she slept as a child.
The Haunting of Hill House Creator Explains the Show's Polarizing Ending

4. Why are some people driven mad by Hill House but not everyone? It's clear that had Olivia never moved into Hill House, she never would have attempted to murder her own children. But then that raises questions about why Olivia succumbed so much to Hill House's corrupting influence while Nell remained relatively untouched. As Flanagan explained, just like how people process grief differently, people react to Hill House differently. "Some people are just more vulnerable. Or more special. There are more ways in, and darkness can infiltrate and take root in their lives in different ways. But there are no characters in our show who are immune," he said. "The symptoms might be harder to see overtly in some, but I'd argue that the house works on the family in equal measure." So even though it looks like Olivia was the only one driven truly mad by Hill House, the house actually had an equal effect on all the family members, even if some of the effects are more difficult to spot.

5. How does the house haunt them outside the actual house? In most haunted house stories, you're safe once you leave the actual premises of the haunted house. Not Hill House, though. Although the limits of the house's reach aren't made explicit, the house and its ghostly residents - particularly Nell and Olivia - are able to haunt the Crains long after they left Hill House. One way to reason this is to think about the house-as-body metaphor. When the Crains built the walls within themselves, they not only trapped their own guilts and fears but part of the house too, enabling the house to follow them across the country and through time. Or maybe it's simply that Hill House is insane, so why would we expect it to follow the rational rules of how we expect a haunted house to work?

6. Why didn't Hugh have a Red Room? When the Crains lived in Hill House, each of them had their own personal Red Room - that is, each of them except Hugh ( Henry Thomas). But when you think about it, this actually makes a lot of sense. The goal of the Red Room was to keep the Crains placated and in the house so that it could feed off them, and it did so by turning itself into what they desired. Since Hugh loved nothing more than to fix things, the Red Room provided him with a problem he could try and fix but never quite solve: the water damage allegedly coming from inside the Red Room. This not only satisfied Hugh's need to be the family problem-solver, but it also kept Hugh distracted, running around the house trying to fix up Hill House while his family was being preyed upon by the exact thing he was trying to repair.
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7. Does a ghost not even need to be dead? If you're having a hard time wrapping your head around the notion that ghosts don't necessarily need to be the spirits of deceased people then you're going to have to open your mind a bit. When Steven ( Michiel Huisman) said that ghosts are guilt and ghosts are secrets, it was a nice metaphor, sure, but the show also takes this idea quite literally. While Nell is being haunted by the Bent-Neck Lady and Luke ( Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is being followed by William Hill, Shirley finds herself haunted by the man she cheated on her husband with. This character, played by One Tree Hill's James Lafferty, isn't dead, but his one-night stand with Shirley continues to haunt her, and therefore he is a ghost.

8. Who grabbed Abigail's hand after she died? If you're still sitting around wondering if Abigail was dead the whole time, you're asking the wrong question. The real mystery here is who came to Abigail's aid right after she died. The beautiful ghost definitely wasn't of this time, but she wasn't a spirit we had seen before. Likely, the woman's identity would have been revealed during Flanagan's planned history of Hill House, but for now fans are left speculating. Some theorize that since time isn't linear, maybe this is an even younger version of Mrs. Dudley ( Annabeth Gish). However, we're going to take things one step further and imagine that it's actually the ghost of Mrs. Dudley's mother-in-law. We know that she worked at Hill House, so maybe she died there too! This would explain why she'd be so ready to comfort Abigail after her murder at Olivia's hand.

The Haunting of Hill House is available to stream on Netflix.
Photos: The 18 Best Scary Movies to Stream Right Now

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The Haunting of Hill House Explained: 8 Burning Questions Answered | TV Guide

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It's been nearly a month since The Haunting of Hill House hit Netflix, but fans are still deep in discussion as they attempt to parse through the complex tale of grief and ghosts. The 10-episode series left viewers with a lot of burning questions and few neatly wrapped up answers.

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The Haunting Of Hill House Official Trailer (2018) Netflix [HD]

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skip to 9:35

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THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (2018) Ending Explained

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The ghost of Olivia greeting Luke to Hill House. Episode 10.

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How is The Haunting of Hill House different than the original novel?

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[This story contains spoilers for the first season of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House.]

As Mike Flanagan worked on his take on the classic tale The Haunting of Hill House, he felt a specter looking over his shoulder: the ghost of Shirley Jackson. The writer and director responsible for films like Oculus, Hush, Gerald's Game, and the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep is a natural horror buff, especially of Jackson's original work.

"I loved the book since I was a kid," Flanagan tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I've equally loved Robert Wise's [film] adaptation." Finding it a fool's errand to try to reinvent the wheel, when he was approached to do a televised take on the story, he chose to take it in a completely different direction. Gone is the plot of four adults investigating paranormal activities, now substituted by a family of seven helplessly besieged by the titular house and its mysterious allure, even decades after the fact.

Flanagan talks with THR about the methodology behind his adaptation, including the thinking behind his fractured timeline, the "Bent Neck Lady" and the "Red Room," as well as how the first season was initially supposed to end.

What inspired the deviation you took from Shirley Jackson's original novel?

When [Netflix] first approached me about the show, my gut reaction was, "Well, it's been done beautifully already. It lends itself perfectly to a feature format. I don't know how you expand what's on the page to fill a season of television. It would have to be a whole new deal." So I went back through the book, and I figured the only way through the woods was [that] we were going to need a much larger character palette to carry a series. I'm just naturally drawn to family drama, and I think in horror, in particular, the way people behave in their families is different than the way they behave out in the world. It strips away all the pretext.

So for me, it was about identifying the elements, characters, moments and even chunks of prose from the book that I really loved and taking all those pieces and trying to build something different out of the same ingredients. It was an odd experiment in that sense because I loved the book so much, I didn't want to hurt it. ( Laughs.) I approached it more as a remix. Once I started looking at it that way, it opened up a lot of really fun possibilities where I could do something that was our own, but I could pepper in the moments of the book that impacted me the most.

The most prominent element of that remix involves your storytelling method, done between two timelines. What led you to pursue showing the main characters both as children and adults?

I love a fractured timeline. I think television is full of really effective examples of how you can play with those timelines in a way that modern TV audiences enjoy. I first sparked to it with Lost and . That was really exciting to me, being able to shed the linear requirements that so many features come with.

I feel like when you talk about a person being haunted, a ghost is boring unless it's directly tied to an experience, emotion or something that's intrinsic to a character. We're all haunted as people, and that was what I thought would make this interesting. Ghosts popping out and scaring somebody can only be interesting one or two times.

If we were going to be doing this as a long format, it had to be about the way every family is a haunted house, and everyone is wrestling with their ghosts from their own childhood and beyond - that echo through decades. That's what I wanted to explore more of, more than the gothic horror and genre moments. Those can be tedious after a while if you're not focused on the characters.

We get to see moments continuously echo between these two timelines, both forward and backward. The final episode features a monologue from Nell (Victoria Pedretti) about this idea, where she mentions her view of time changing from a line of dominoes falling to a scattering of moments like rain. Why did you use that thinking to connect your two stories?

That passage that you referenced is one of my favorites in the show. We talk about memory, and we talk about our experience of our childhood and how we process our family and our formative years. It is such a non-linear thing. It's something that we look back on and experience in a kaleidoscope instead of a series of cause and effect. That was something thematically that found itself into the writers room very early. We knew the ending before we knew anything else. So it was like, "OK, how do we get there in a way that's going to honor Nell's experience?" That was one of the most exciting aspects of it for me.

One of the advantages you were able to take in a serialized format is the use of build. When we first see Steven (Michiel Huisman), he's almost the audience analogue, as we're also trying to figure out a rational explanation behind what's going on before things build to a fever pitch. What was the process of writing that rising action like for you?

We always looked at it like a 10-hour movie. The trick for me was, "How do we sustain tension and how do we make sure we don't have scenes that dissipate?" I wanted them to echo in later episodes. It's one of the opportunities that episodic TV presents; the episodes can be warped mirrors of each other. It was a blend of trying to approach it the way I would a very long film but [also] try to take advantage of the format in a way that let us light a lot of fuses and run a lot of threads that wouldn't necessarily pay off for a long time. We all wanted it to be something you can watch more than once and get something different out of it.

A big thread came from the reveal of the "Bent Neck Lady," where it turns out the spirit that's been haunting Nell since her childhood was the future version of herself in her last moments. How did you approach the idea of ghosts in your adaptation?

We actually fleshed out a thorough history for Hill House. We intended to shoot it; it was going to open each episode with a chapter from Steven's book. Ultimately, we went away from that because it felt like that was taking away from the mystery and enigma of it.

We were going to take the position, especially with the Bent Neck Lady, that a ghost in this show is not necessarily what you think it is. A ghost can be a premonition, or in Shirley's [Elizabeth Reaser] case, an imagined manifestation of guilt. It felt like we were going to hurt that theme if we spent too much time trying to explain the ghosts. By the end, we put in more ghosts than the story of the house would even support. I wanted to feel like the things that were collected there were too sprawling for the actual amount of time the house existed. It collected these fractured psyches of the people who had been inside.

Speaking of those fractured psyches, I want to talk about the mysterious "Red Room." In the finale, it's revealed that while the room appears locked on the surface, it's actually served as a unique space suited to each family member's tastes. Nell mentions how it lured them in with comfort while simultaneously "digesting" them. How did you come up with this concept?

It was one of our writers, Rebecca Klingel, who had first pitched it. I had wanted something really special for the Red Room. We knew we were going to keep that door closed for a long time. I was saying along the lines of, "We're going to want to see what's in that room so badly by the end of this, whatever it is has to be great." And she pitched, "Well, what if we have seen it, and we just don't know it?" There's something really insidious about being placated while being eaten by this house. ( Laughs.)

So we used the same set; we just redressed and repainted it for each use. It gets really specific to who they are as to what's dressed inside. That was really fun, the idea that we could use our production design for that space to reflect aspects of the character. That was one of my favorite twists that came out of the writers room. It gave us an engine for most of the first half of the season.

One of the prevailing themes throughout The Haunting of Hill House is building a wall. Early in the season, Olivia advises Theo to build a wall of bricks around her to make her safe. But by the end, we get the story of the man found inside the basement wall, who put himself in there to get rid of fear and guilt, only to have them next to him. How did this become an idea that transcended both timelines?

That was a thing that struck me about Shirley Jackson's book: the walls that Nell had put up. Eleanor in the novel has walled herself off from society; she's so sheltered and has never really left home. She goes from this completely contained and insular existence to what she perceives as the expansive world around her. And it's just another house; it's another box. For the show, it seemed like a wonderful thing that happens with families. The psychological safe spaces that we make for ourselves and our family members, and how much of a challenge it is to tear them down. That was a theme that Shirley Jackson got into our heads with and inspired a lot of us in the writers room to thread that through in many ways.

Let's talk about the very end of the season. While the family members still alive come together to celebrate Luke's (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) sobriety, we get a monologue from Steven about how fear and love are the same types of emotion. They're like siblings, both involving the relinquishment of logic and patterns. Why did you choose to end the Crain story this way?

A lot of it is a shared experience we all connected with in the room. It's really hard to resolve horror; it's hard to end stories like this. We had been through so much in the course of writing it. Each of us had dug so deep into our own families and stories to try to inform the show that we all craved a moment of peace at the end.

We toyed with the idea for a little while that over that monologue, over the image of the family together, we would put the Red Room window in the background. For a while, that was the plan. Maybe they never really got out of that room. The night before it came time to shoot it, I sat up in bed, and I felt guilty about it. I felt like it was cruel. That surprised me. I'd come to love the characters so much that I wanted them to be happy. I came in to work and said, "I don't want to put the window up. I think it's mean and unfair." Once that gear had kicked in, I wanted to lean as far in that direction as possible. We've been on this journey for 10 hours; a few minutes of hope was important to me.

On the other side, you have the family members who died. The siblings can get their finished business with Nell, while Hugh (Timothy Hutton) agrees to join Olivia (Carla Gugino) and "wake up" in exchange for their children's freedom. It's as if to say it will be OK here and it will be OK in the end, even though the journey may never technically end.

Steven inherits Hugh's responsibility, and the house is still standing. It's still haunted, and everyone's still trapped. But they're together. It is a little bittersweet. When we think about families, that's what we're left with. We're stuck with our family no matter what, and even if it's not going to be OK, even if we're never going to get back what we lost, at least we can find a way to live with that. That little bit of comfort meant a lot to me. We could have gone pretty cynical, and almost did. But I find myself glad that we didn't.

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'The Haunting of Hill House' Creator Addresses the Show's Biggest Terrors and Twists

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This story contains spoilers for the first season of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House.] As Mike Flanagan worked on his take on the classic tale The Haunting of Hill House, he felt a specter looking over his shoulder: the ghost of Shirley Jackson.

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Shirley sees a "ghost" of the man she had an affair with as a representation of her guilt

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Synopsis of The Haunting of Hill House that also explains its ending and connections to grief

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Trauma builds walls. Left untended, they keep going up. Soon, you're trapped in a house of its making: long hallways leading nowhere, empty rooms, doors that swing open and slam shut by the weather of your moods. You climb the stairs and shout through the windows, hungry for a way out, lost in the labyrinthine sinew of personal devastation. Some of us find an escape. Some of us don't.

Netflix's new ten-episode horror series, The Haunting of Hill House, uses Shirley Jackson's famous novel as a road map to explore this house-as-body metaphor, and it does so with a profound and precise tenderness. Creator and director Mike Flanagan crafts a wholly unique haunted-house fable - abandoning the book's paranormal investigation plot - using the hollow halls of a disordered mansion to tell the story of the disordered family who lives there. The hidden ghosts of Hill House aren't nameless spooks trapped between spiritual realms; they are personal manifestations for the people they haunt, visual aids for the truths they must accept and vanquish. It's not a paranormal story so much as a meditation on the distinct way grief and trauma maim the living. And it's scary as hell.

Hill House follows the Crain family, who move into the eponymous mansion in the early '90s with the intention of flipping it, selling it, and using the profit to build their "forever house." Patriarch Hugh (Henry Thomas) is a loving, dedicated father and husband, and his wife Olivia (Carla Gugino) a dreamy free spirit with a maternal warmth that glows off the screen. Their five children - Steven (Paxton Singleton), Shirley (Lulu Wilson), Theodora (Mckenna Grace), and twins Nell and Luke (Violet McGraw and Julian Hilliard) - explore their new home, but are more trepidatious of it than their parents, feeding more directly off its malignity, seeing things only children might: specters in the dark, phantom bugs, rooms that shouldn't exist. Hugh and Olivia initially chalk the kids' anxieties up to childhood imagination, but Olivia soon falls under the same spell as her kids. One night, something tragic and mysterious happens - the exact circumstance is nestled in the show's deliberately obfuscated storytelling - and Hugh flees Hill House with his children in tow, leaving Olivia behind. She dies, but we don't know how because her children don't know, and Hill House keeps us locked to their perspectives. The mystery of their mother's final, fatal moments haunts them into adulthood. Her loss is the house they must escape.

We spend most of our time with the grown-up, present-day Crains. Steven (Michiel Huisman) is now the best-selling author of a book about his family's paranormal experiences at Hill House, though he remains a skeptic. Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) is a mortician who lives in a funeral home with her husband and two children. Theodora (Kate Siegel), a child psychologist with psychometric abilities, lives in Shirley's guest house, filling her void with booze and one-night stands. The twins have fared worst in their mother's absence: Nell (Victoria Pedretti) is clinically depressed and manic, and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is addicted to heroin. The two weave in and out of their older siblings' lives, burdening them with their sharper anguish. They were the only Crain childrenthere for their mother's final moments, and so they carry the weight of her absence.

The first episode of Hill House ends with a sting that sets the tone for the series. After scaring her father Hugh (played by Timothy Hutton in the present) with a chilling phone call, Nell turns up in Steven's apartment. He's annoyed that she's arrived unannounced, but before he can fully chastise her, Hugh calls with bad news: Nell is dead. She killed herself in Hill House. Steven, frightened, turns to face whoever or whatever is in his home. Nell, suddenly right behind him, begins to scream, her face contorting into a grey, deadly vision before she disappears. Nell, who in her childhood was haunted by a disfigured ghost she called the "Bent-Neck Lady," has become that ghost herself, the victim of an inborn phantom that lives in all of the Crain children, but most tragically in her.

Each Crain gets their own bottle episode, but Nell's - episode five, named after the Bent-Neck Lady - is the crux of the series, an inevitable hour of impending doom that marries paranormal activity with psychological calamity. Nell, like her mother, is okay until she isn't, happy until life grips her psyche and suffocates her sanity. We witness her evolution from a young, happy bride whose struggles with sleep paralysis are cushioned by her technician husband, to a widow undone by his sudden death. We watch as she spins out of control - enabling Luke's addiction by buying him drugs, lashing out at visiting Theo, crashing Steven's book reading and accusing him of trading her personal pain for profit. Lost in the depths of her mania, she flies from her Los Angeles home to just outside of Boston, back to Hill House, where she sees the ghost of her mother. "Mommy," Nell calls out, her voice breaking. Olivia is scrawling "Welcome home, Eleanor" in red chalk on the wall, a clear link between a mental disorder shared by mother and daughter, the house as their meeting point. Nell then wanders through Hill House in a dreamy trance. She sees the mirage of a happy family; she dances with her husband. Then she hangs herself from the same staircase where her mother plunged to her own death two decades earlier, under the influence of mental illness or ghosts - ghosts that may or may not exist, but they are wildly real to the women they break.

Many shows tell stories about grief and mental illness - This Is Us, The Affair, A Million Little Things - but rarely with such an authentic gravity as The Haunting of Hill House. It's the little things: the blunt way an adult Steven tells his father, "I miss my mom"; a model of the "forever home" that Shirley keeps in her office; the gloves Theodora wears to avoid her telepathic abilities, but also because they were her mother's suggestion. A sober Luke clinging desperately to the female friend he made in rehab, looking for whatever vestige of salvation he can find. The way Hugh whispers to his dead wife as if she's standing beside him, knowing full well she isn't. Nell realizing she was the Break-Neck Lady all along, visions of her future suicide coloring the brighter days of her youth.

As the child of a dead mother, Hill House struck me in my core, especially in the show's beautiful centerpiece sixth episode, " Two Storms." As the Crains gather at Shirley's funeral home for Nell's wake, the brunt force of their grief boils over in ways anyone intimately familiar with loss will recognize. Filmed in a series of continuous long takes, the episode is suffocating: We watch in real-time as the Crain siblings bite at their mutual insecurities and shared grief, and air out their anxieties. "There were seven of us, and now there's five, because two of us decided to die," Shirley says through tears, condemning her mother and sister before circling back around to Nell's pain. "I wish she felt like she could have talked to me." Theo pours drink after drink, Steven and Luke share childhood stories of their sister, while Hugh wanders the halls of the funeral parlor, stumbling on a memory from their Hill House days that links his daughter's suicide to the early stages of his wife's paranoia.

Hill House makes great use of its setting and genre, with plenty of jump scares, ghouls, and gore to satiate horror fans. But its power is not in how thoughtfully it scares, but in how deeply it penetrates. It forces us to contend with our own buried thoughts and emotions, the family secrets that fester deep within, and it does so with an elegant and even hand, telling stories across two timelines: the Crain children's time in Hill House, and their lives as adults, as they deal with the fallout of the psychological trauma they experienced there. Like HBO's Sharp Objects, it shows that trauma and memory operate largely in concert with one another, inflicting the mind randomly, sometimes violently. "Two Storms" is the culmination of this principle, an episode that weaves together past and present, showing how trauma multiples and lingers, and how it pops back up when we least expect it - and when it feels so large it's almost funny in its duplicity.

Everything - the stress, the trauma, the in-fighting - builds to a finale that is surprisingly cathartic; a bombastic and saccharine hour that lets the tension slowly from the family's shared stress. They all return to Hill House to track down Luke, who has gone back to his childhood home to burn the place down. The house prevents its own destruction and puts Luke under its spell, causing him to overdose on drugs. His surviving siblings find him behind the Red Door, in a mysterious and impenetrable room they could never unlock as kids, the same room where their mother's madness fully took hold. As he's about to die, the ghost of Nell appears and saves him. She then speaks to each of her siblings, forgiving them for not saving her, letting them know it wasn't their fault.

Nell's monologue is long and a little bit silly, but I can't deny the spell it cast on me, a person whose life - like the Crains - is stained by grief and mental illness. When a revived Luke tells Nell he doesn't want to live without her, she responds with words so soothing, they brought me to tears: "There's no without. I'm not gone. I'm scattered into so many pieces, sprinkled on your life like new snow."

It's fragrant language, bold in its message, and it won't work for everyone. But sometimes grief is brash like that. Sometimes you need to wrap yourself in the comfort of forgiveness, in the broad-stroke melodrama that is life and loss and the enduring pain they conjure. Flanagan understands this, and has forged from the bones of Jackson's work something personal, probing, and transcendent. Trauma builds walls around us, but The Haunting of Hill House shines a light on the exit.

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The Profound Grief of The Haunting of Hill House

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Netflix's 10-episode horror series The Haunting of Hill House is not a paranormal story so much as a meditation on the ways grief and trauma maim the living. And it's scary as hell.

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Interview with show creator

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One of the great surprises of 2018 has been Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House. A slow burn of a ghost series, House takes its time but is, by turns, terrifying, moving, and devastating. Based on the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, the 10-episode series is also a wildly ambitious and brilliantly conceived directorial outing by the incredibly inventive Mike Flanagan ( Gerald's Game).

On a break from shooting an adaptation of Stephen King's sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, Flanagan spoke in-depth with EW about building Hill House, tackling grief, and the horrors of plotting a possible second season.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is almost more of an homage to Shirley Jackson's novel and less of a straight adaptation. Where did you start with this project?
MIKE FLANAGAN: Yeah, I've heard people describe it as an echo and I thought that was really cool. I thought of it as fanfic for a little while, to be honest.

Amblin Partners brought the project to me and they had the rights to it and they said, "We'd love to develop this for TV," and my first response to it was, "Well, how?" I've loved that book since I was a kid, and I'm in love with the Robert Wise movie and I looked at the material and I was like, "I don't know how you can expand this to 10 hours as it is. I think you'd have to do something pretty drastic."

As I went off to think about it, it seemed really pointless to try to out Shirley Jackson Shirley Jackson, and it also seemed really pointless to try to one-up Robert Wise. I think his adaptation is perfect. So it always seemed like we had to do something different, and for me, it was about opening up the book, going through it line by line, and picking out the moments and the characters and the themes and even lines of prayers that really spoke to me in trying to take all those pieces and put them together in a new order and build out around them.

It's way more of a remix than an adaptation, and I know that that really kind of scared me at first, because I had no idea how Shirley Jackson fans would react to that, and I think they're reacting in equal measure both ways I expected. But it certainly isn't a straight adaptation, for sure.

What struck me the most is that I think grief is such a universal experience that when we were in the writers' room, every one of the writers at the table had their own perspective on it that came to bear with this, and that's something that jumped out immediately that yeah, when you talk about ghosts and you talk about what gothic horror can do, this is an incredible opportunity to really lean face first into some of the saddest and darkest things that we all deal with.

Then we built the interior to try to incorporate a lot of those more eclectic design elements that you see outside, but yeah, that house is just sitting in the woods of Georgia, kind of inexplicably.

The other thing we did with the interior to help make it feel like something is off is that we tried to use design elements that look like human faces everywhere we could, in the wallpaper, in the light fixtures, and in the doorknobs. Everywhere we were gonna be looking, we wanted it to feel like the house was always looking back, and I think that subliminal sense that there's a face somewhere in the frame just makes it feel off everywhere.

We wrote all of the camera choreography into the script for the episode, back before we started production. So, when we started designing the house, we were designing elements of it specifically to the requirements of episode six. Hill House was on one stage, the funeral home was on another, and we had to build this hallway between the two stages so we could physically walk from one stage to the other and step into Hill House without cutting.

We rehearsed it with our second team stand-ins, who basically performed the entire episode as actors for about five weeks straight, every day. We had shut down production and we just rehearsed with them, with the crew, and kept running it and running it and running it. After a month of that, we brought the cast in and we were able to show them the episode. We had shot it with the second team. So we said, "Here it is and this is what we're doing," and then the cast had two weeks with us in rehearsal. We kind of looked at it like live TV. Ultimately, it's five long shots and we did one a day for five days. It almost killed us. It almost killed everybody.

Our fear when we were making it was that we would fail, that we just would never get to the end of one of these takes. And then the worst-case scenario for me was that if we did finish it and put it out there, if the characters in the story and the performances weren't working as well as the technical element that people would find it boring and just be kind of hungry for a cut. So I'm really glad that it's being received the way it is because that was the hardest and riskiest and scariest thing I think any of us on that stage had ever done.

There's a big gag when Olivia's going through the halls and the statues are tracking her. When you come back their heads are all in different positions, which looks really cool except that when you see the crew members hiding behind the wall carrying statues that all have different head positions and frantically diving into frame to get them there before the camera turns back around, it's funny.

So yeah, it was a circus, and it was the weirdest thing for me and for Michael, because typically we're really involved in a given take. But with this, all of our work was up front and all we could do was sit at the monitor and watch, and there was just nothing we could do anymore. Usually about halfway through a take, if it looked like we had a chance to get it, we would just grip the armrests and I think I held my breath for the last three minutes of that third segment, which is our longest.

But it was helpless. It was just like, "Well, anything could happen." And you'd see a crew member dip into frame, running out with a bounce cart or something, and we'd look over to our visual effects and just stare at them, pleading silently like, "Can we take that out? Can you fix that? Can you fix that? Because if you can fix that, we'll keep going." Yeah, it was just panic, but it really worked out.

I imagine it was difficult especially for someone like Carla Gugino who had to have varying degrees of sanity over the course of the series. Was it like, "Okay, now you're at a 10" or "Now it's a 3?"
It wasn't quite a numeric system but it was close, as to just where she was. There are very few people, I think, who can handle that like Carla can [Flanagan directed Gugino in 2017's Gerald's Game]. She's so prepared. She had thoroughly broken down the entire series before we even got there to shoot the pilot, as far as her journey on it, and so she was diligent and constantly recalibrating to make sure she was in the right place.

And your wife, Kate Siegel, plays Theo, right? She's so great.
Right before we got married, we made this Netflix movie called Hush together and surviving that production experience, we co-wrote it and she starred and it was such a wonderful thing that we came out of it and said, "Hey, we should just get married. If we survived that, we'll be fine." And yeah, I'm always looking for an opportunity to show everybody else what I see in her, and she's just marvelous. Also, I don't know that either one of us could have survived a year of production being away from each other, so it was really wonderful that we got to do this, and I think she crushed it.

And there's little jokes, too. In the pilot, you hear Steven trip and it seems like he messes up while he tries to swear. He comes in with the "fothermucker" and he learns it from his dad in episode seven. There are a lot of those really long burn, over years and years, little references that we wanted to echo each other. It's always fun just to look for the ghosts, too.

But Poppy, as we got rid of that history section and were leaning into that ghost we would bring into frame, she kind of embodied the insanity of Hill House, and she brought to it the femininity and the kind of twisted maternal instinct of it. So I think describing her as patient zero for this iteration is perfectly correct and she's actually played by Katie Parker, who starred in my very first film ever.

After the story she told Mrs. Dudley (Annabeth Gish) about her father's death, it felt like maybe Olivia had been drawn to the house. Is that totally off base?
No, no, no, you're absolutely correct. Absolutely. To steal from Stephen King, we talked about how the characters "shine" and that Olivia, being sensitive, as she puts it, kind of having a type of emotionality that is supernatural in the way she processes it, that she would have passed that down to her daughters, and that each of them would have gotten a splinter of that from her, if she was the prism of it. Theo gets the touch and Shirley has the dream sleep and the intuition and Nell is able to look across time.

For the house, Olivia certainly is the big meal. I think that that side of her, which is something that we really, really loved about Jackson's book, both Eleanor and Theodora, that they had this unique sensitivity, this special paranormal energy to them. I think that absolutely drew her to the house and I think it's what powered the engine of the house for decades, ultimately.

While most everyone sees dead people, Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) actually sees a ghost (One Tree Hill's James Lafferty) in the form of an affair she had. Why make that choice?
Well, we really wanted to lean into the idea that a ghost can be a lot of different things, and I didn't want every specter in the show to just be someone who had died in Hill House. We played it in a couple of ways. The Bent-Neck Lady isn't a ghost for so long. And then she is. I wanted to play with that expectation, that of course you see this striking silhouette with the bent neck. It's like, "That's a ghost," and then it's like, well, no, it's actually not.

Similar to little Abigail, it was really fun to do like, "Oh, look at the little ghost girl," and she isn't, and so with Shirley, leading into that theme of a ghost can be a regret or a memory, we wanted to embody it and talk about what specifically haunted her. While all the characters are haunted by the death of their mom and the breakdown of their family, that seems like a really wonderful opportunity for a character who otherwise seems to be in such control of her life, almost to her own detriment, to express that metaphysically. That was a fun play on ghosts for us in the writers' room, but it also let me get my buddy James Lafferty on set.

So we put Victoria in her makeup and we put her in the backseat and Kate and Elizabeth knew where it was coming and it was scripted, and I just told Victoria before we read the first take to come in substantially earlier than the written cue. The girls had another half page of dialogue to go through as written, and so Elizabeth and Kate were just in the scene and they knew they had another half page of words to get through before Victoria would appear, and she just bolted up right in the middle of their lines, and so their reaction is completely genuine. It also scared the s*** out of all of us at the monitor. All of us who knew it was coming were completely blindsided by it and every time I've seen it, I'm never prepared. I'm just never ready for it, because I get sucked into what they're saying and they seem so relaxed that it just gets me.

That said, I think more than anything, the show is about haunted places and haunted people, as Steve says, and there's no shortage of either. So, there's any number of things we could do, in or out of Hill House.

You've directed an adaptation of Stephen King's Gerald's Game and now you're doing Doctor Sleep. King tweeted he loves the show - that must feel pretty cool.
It's insane. It always blows my mind, and I've never spoken to Steve. We email all the time, actually, especially with Doctor Sleep going, but I've never met him and he's been my hero since I was a kid. it started because he tweeted about Hush, and that's what got Gerald's Game going. I had no idea he was watching the show. We've never discussed the show. I saw it come up on Twitter, and I make the same noise every time. It's like a little 12-year-old who just squeaks, and I like to think at some point in my career, maybe I'll get better at reacting to that. It's surreal to me and wonderful, and I'm thrilled he loves the show because the other thing I also know about him is if he doesn't like something, he isn't shy about it.

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'The Haunting of Hill House' creator answers burning questions and reveals hidden clues

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One of the great surprises of 2018 has been Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House . A slow burn of a ghost series, House takes its time but is, by turns, terrifying, moving, and devastating.

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When I hit play on Netflix's adaptation of "The Haunting of Hill House," I didn't expect to end up rooting for the house. The opening episodes of this interpretation of Shirley Jackson's classic gothic-horror story were promisingly eerie, all shadows and inky blacks, and I crossed my fingers for something satisfying-a stylishly directed Halloween binge-watch, with a few decent jump scares. And, now and then, it delivers. But there's something existentially soul-dead to the over-all enterprise; it has corn syrup in its veins instead of blood.

Jackson's funny-nasty psychological thriller is about a very bad house, which is described in fabulously hyperbolic terms: Hill House is "arrogant and hating," full of "sickening, degraded cold." In the novel, we're trapped not merely inside this malevolent architecture but in the mind of an unreliable mouseburger named Eleanor, a spinster whose sanity gets eaten away during her days at Hill House, where she's gone to participate in a study about the paranormal. Mike Flanagan, the show's creator, takes these ingredients-bad house, shy woman, blurry line between insanity and ghosts-and pours them into a fresh mold, transforming the neurotic adults of the study into a nuclear family, like that of "The Amityville Horror," "Poltergeist," and "Six Feet Under"-but also, and mainly, of NBC's hit family drama " This Is Us."

It's a sharp commercial concept. When the story starts, the five Crain siblings-know-it-all Steven, bossy Shirley, prickly Theodora, and the sweet twins, Luke and Nell-are hot, brooding basket cases, survivors of a summer that nobody wants to talk about. Twenty-five years ago, they all fled the mansion screaming, leaving their mother, Olivia, behind to die, supposedly from suicide but maybe from something worse. The show's chronology is scrambled, so only gradually, over ten episodes, through incrementally doled-out twists and flashbacks, do we find out exactly what happened.

The approach is familiar: we've seen it, recently, on everything from "Lost" to "Damages," " True Detective," and " Sharp Objects." Yet, early on, the direction is hypnotic enough to make it feel newish, gliding with fluidity between past and present. At a funeral, Hugh Crain, the family's estranged father, sees his adult children as kids, including the one in the coffin; when he wanders through a funeral-home hallway, he enters Hill House and watches his younger self come down the stairs. The camera performs some wickedly effective tricks, such as hovering close to a character's face as she glimpses a fresh horror-a ghost, a corpse, or, sometimes, nothing at all-and then lingering there, refusing to show us what's scaring her (and suggesting, by implication, that we're the scary thing). Then, midway through, there's one truly skillful episode, "The Bent-Neck Lady." A beautifully structured fairy tale with a sad ending, it's an O. Henry story about mortality, in which the gentlest Crain, Nell, is haunted by her own terrifying future-the fear of which leads her straight to that terrible fate.

But an episode isn't a season. Clever direction, on its own, isn't good art. And a reshuffled chronology can masquerade as complexity-an ongoing irritation in our era of streaming television, in which puzzle-solving has become an easy way to motivate viewers to push play, by retrofitting momentum onto a story that's not really about anything, other than closure. Even the best episodes of "The Haunting of Hill House" have big problems, among them performances that are all over the map-and, occasionally, as with the unscary ghost of a flapper, straight out of summer stock. But the bigger problem is that the pungency of the original story-its off-kilter vision of how fear shreds identity; its insight into social outsiders-has been drained away, sanded over, then renovated with Goop-y self-help truisms about bereavement and healing.

Supernatural stories are natural vehicles for confronting grief, of course. But, too often, "Hill House" reduces the ungraspable terrors that shudder through the original to mere "issues," as if evil were just another trauma to be confronted, then resolved. There's something stealthily cornball in the show's vision of human character, which renders even a relapsing heroin addict as yet another cute, shaggy sad boy, whose worst act is to help a friend. Since the Crains are each matched up, as if by corporate algorithm, with ethnically varied but entirely undeveloped love interests, it's awfully hard to blame them for their intimacy issues. There's lots of parenting advice in the show-talk to your kids about death, tell them that it's O.K. to be sad, and believe them when they describe a hidden basement that is not in the blueprints-but it all feels pre-chewed, anodyne. Health kills horror.

Most frustratingly, the adaptation abandons the raw feminine perversity that made Jackson's story so indelible. In the book, Eleanor is a true-blue weirdo. She's Emily Dickinson, she's Jane Eyre-a dangerously needy oddball, but also one who's funny, observant, and full of rage. She's a mess, but she's a specific mess: "I have red shoes, she thought-that goes with being Eleanor; I dislike lobster and sleep on my left side and crack my knuckles when I am nervous and save buttons."

Nobody in the Netflix version has anything like this granular eccentricity. Instead, the characters feel cut and pasted from some emoji file labelled "scowling brunette," then outfitted with lesbianism or bossiness. Eleanor's traits get distributed willy-nilly: her anxiety about living with her sister goes to Theodora Crain, a child psychologist slash intimacy-impaired clairvoyant; Eleanor's iconic "cup of stars" monologue, which is all about defying conformity, is placed in the mouth of Hill House's caretaker, Mrs. Dudley, a character who swings, for no reason, from fundamentalist bully to stoic heroine.

And Nell suffers from anxiety, just like her namesake, Eleanor. What may rankle the most is the way that this character-Eleanor's closest analogue-is transformed from a queer duck into a dream girl. Nell is a sweet child, then a glowing bride, then a grieving widow. At every step, she's a lovely, loving woman whom everybody adores. She's the sort of female character who gets described in a casting breakdown as "gorgeous, but she doesn't know it." It's not that Victoria Pedretti doesn't give an appealing performance, particularly in "The Bent-Neck Lady," which is her showcase-she delivers some truly terrifying scenes of sleep paralysis-but there's a cloying blandness to her character's conception. All fury and peculiarity are cut away. When Nell suffers, it's for no deeper reason than that she's been designated by the plot to suffer, and to make us care. She's pathos-bait.

Only one actress manages to defy this pseudo-gothic conformity, the fabulous Carla Gugino, who plays the doomed mother, Olivia. Swanning around in astonishing high-femme outfits-to comfort a child after a nightmare, she wears an emerald velvet robe over a peach negligee, with cork-heeled platforms-she reads like a little girl's notion of a grown woman. Miraculously, Gugino comes across as both a sensitive, faintly bohemian parent and, without its being any contradiction, a terrifying diva, capable of bloodcurdling crimes. Other characters try to find a clear cause for Olivia's behavior, as she smashes mirrors and slips into fugue states: they blame mental illness, or her husband's neglect, or those damned pushy ghosts. But Gugino's charisma resists the story's attempts to simplify matters. Her seductive intensity, which wavers uneasily between giggle-inducing and chilling, shudders with the chaos that the story represses, a force pushing back at the show's unwillingness to let anyone be pathological.

I won't spoil the finale, but let me put it this way: the final line from the book-"And whatever walked there, walked alone"-has been mutilated so hilariously that, if you squint, you might think the creators were being ironic. In Jackson's version, two intruders arrive halfway through the study, spiritualists who insist that anyone who fears ghosts is a bigot: spirits are just lonely, waiting for someone to talk to. "How would you feel if people refused to believe in you," the newcomers chide the terrorized participants, who keep warning them not to go outside at night. This damp sentimentality, so brutally satirized by Jackson, is the guiding principle of Flanagan's series. "Ghosts are guilt. Ghosts are secrets. Ghosts are regrets and failings," Steven explains. "But most times . . . most times a ghost is a wish." Fingers crossed for something bolder, sometime soon. ♦

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Netflix's Soul-Dead Version of "The Haunting of Hill House"

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When I hit play on Netflix's adaptation of "The Haunting of Hill House," I didn't expect to end up rooting for the house. The opening episodes of this interpretation of Shirley Jackson's classic gothic-horror story were promisingly eerie, all shadows and inky blacks, and I crossed my fingers for something satisfying-a stylishly directed Halloween binge-watch, with a few decent jump scares.

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on victims of...should Netflix's frame meaningful content differently?

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Not everybody liked The Haunting of Hill House.

At the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum called the show "existentially soul-dead." She compared the show's characters to Shirley Jackson's original novel, and found them lacking. She writes:

In Jackson's version, two intruders arrive halfway through the study, spiritualists who insist that anyone who fears ghosts is a bigot: spirits are just lonely, waiting for someone to talk to. "How would you feel if people refused to believe in you," the newcomers chide the terrorized participants, who keep warning them not to go outside at night. This damp sentimentality, so brutally satirized by Jackson, is the guiding principle of [the] series.

"Damp sentimentality" doesn't capture the show's powerful effect for some survivors of family trauma. Some viewers see forced resolution in the show's emotionally charged final episodes, but others found closure.

"Most times a ghost is a wish," explains one character in the story. For decades, every character in the TV series longs for the return of a lost loved one, second chances, and resolution.

On Reddit, scores of readers shared intensely personal stories of family trauma, and how the show helped them rethink these old wounds.

"For me, it was almost like immersion therapy," wrote one reader dealing with nightmares and trauma from a difficult childhood. "Going through a pretty bad bout of depression lately and this ending just helped pull me out and inspire me."

Another reader shared stories of her traumatic experiences with her own mother. "I never expected a horror series to have had this much impact on me," she wrote. "This series articulated what I currently feel as a mom and how I should not allow my fear to overrun the joys of life. It has also helped to articulate my mom's fear and probable state of mind with regard to me, her child."

Finally, a mother explained how the show helped her children talk about an unimaginable tragedy within their family. She wrote:

"this was the closest any fiction had ever come to the horror and the breaking and the general haunting of loss. It was gut wrenching and cathartic. My youngest daughter who also just finished the series felt like it spoke to her...like it was made for her ... I think this show and our talk helped us to better understand each other's experiences and the mental impact it had on our family."

Those viewers found a bit of peace during a brutal year for survivors. I wish these moving stories could play a larger role in the conversation about The Haunting of Hill House and horror fandom.

Maybe "damp sentimentality" seems like a flaw when it surfaces inside one of our gloomiest genres, but the creators of the Netflix series answered another kind of wish - the desire for a measure of resolution during this most difficult year.

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How 'The Haunting of Hill House' Helps Some Cope with Family Trauma

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Not everybody liked The Haunting of Hill House. At the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum called the show "existentially soul-dead." She compared the show's characters to Shirley Jackson's original novel, and found them lacking. She writes: In Jackson's version, two intruders arrive halfway through the study, spiritualists who insist that anyone who fears ghosts is a bigot: spirits are just lonely, waiting for someone to talk to.

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The Haunting of Hill House: The Ghosts No One Is Talking About – Wisecrack Quick Take

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How the five Crain children represent the five states of grief

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How the five Crain children represent the five states of grief

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Spoiler Alert

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 1 of The Haunting of Hill House.]
Netflix's hit series The Haunting of Hill House mixes family drama with some chilling horror for a scary good time. But the series goes beyond that with deep layered storytelling and direction that make it a masterpiece.

The deeper viewers dive into the story of the Crain family, the more new theories and hidden secrets they uncover. And one of the more recent social media theories was actually confirmed by show creator Mike Flanagan himself!

Posting to Tumblr, one fan wrote, "The moment you realize each of the Crain kids represent one of the stages of grief." That single post sparked a flurry of activity that eventually caught the notice of Flanagan, who responded on Twitter. "Good catch..." he wrote.

Good catch... https://t.co/TtZ3OgbYQt

- Mike Flanagan (@flanaganfilm) October 23, 2018

For those unfamiliar with the five stages of grief, they are as follows: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. As to who each of those stages applies, think of it as descending order of the Crains, from oldest to youngest: Steven ( Michiel Huisman) is denial, Shirley ( Elizabeth Reaser) is anger, Theo (Kate Siegel) is bargaining, Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is depression, and Nell (Victoria Pedretti) is acceptance.

Below, we're breaking down how each of the stages apply to the Crain siblings with examples from the show. And beware readers - there are tons of spoilers ahead!

Steven Crain as Denial

The oldest of the Crain siblings, Steven is a horror "non-fiction" author who doesn't believe a word he writes. When his siblings or father Hugh ( Timothy Hutton/Henry Thomas) claim to see anything or describe unusual occurrences, he's quick to discredit them. He believes that his mother was mentally ill that his father went insane, but by the season's end, the truth about what he thinks is flipped on its head.

In the first episode when he sees an apparition of Nell in his apartment, he isn't willing to accept it, but later, Hugh points out that a clock repairman in Hill House his son claimed to have seen was in fact a ghost. By the final episode, Steven's forced to stop denying these spirits when they return to the old house, and only then is he finally free.

Shirley Crain as Anger

The second-oldest sibling (and arguably the most Type A) Shirley serves as a stand-in matriarch for the Crains after their mother's death, but she's outwardly resentful. Initially, she tries to help Luke with rehab, but he leaves her high-and-dry when he flees the facility. After that, her big brother Steven's book about the family causes an irreparable tenseness between the two.

We ultimately learn that part of Shirley's anger stems from the uncertainty of what's going on around her, as well as her losing control - she likes having a handle on things. She also has pent-up guilt over a one-night stand that took place years ago, which comes bubbling up to the surface when she catches her husband and sister Theo in a compromising position. Though it's actually not what it looks like, it forces Shirley to wrangle with her true feelings. This, on top of her anger over Nell's suicide, make for one powerful stage.

Theo Crain as Bargaining

As the middle child, Theo is clearly controlling who she lets in and who she keeps out of her life - she wears those gloves to stifle any and all feelings... that is, until she wants to feel something. Able to sense emotions and knowledge simply by touching others, Theo tries to rationalize everything around her. When she's unhappy with something, she makes it so that she is.

Theo does what she wants to do, she even became a psychologist and uses that knowledge to make sense of the things patients tell her, like the girl who tells her about "Mr. Smiley" - a monster who Theo discovers is actually the young girl's abusive foster father. After Theo touches Nell's dead body, she can no longer feel anything spurring her to realize she actually yearns for connection. That's how she ends up drinking to excess and trying to kiss her brother-in-law.

Luke Crain as Depression

The most obvious of the stages is Luke who, along with twin sister Nell, experienced some of the worst things in Hill House. So it's not surprising that Luke becomes addicted to heroin, using the drug as a coping mechanism. At the time of Nell's death, he has gone the longest stretch of being clean - 90 days. What better way to knock him back down than to take away his other half?

But even before Nell dies, Luke struggles with his addiction, missing her wedding after Shirley turns him away for being too strung-out. Over and over he's haunted by the memories of Hill House, the loss of his mother, and now the death of his sister - it's enough to make anyone sink into a depressed state. By the series end, we learn Luke has learned to manage his depression and drug addiction as he's two years clean.

Nell Crain as Acceptance

The youngest of the Crain siblings (by just minutes), Nell is constantly haunted by what she calls "The Bent Neck Lady." Viewers and Nell eventually learn that this apparition was actually her all along, trying to warn herself about her future death by hanging. And as terrifying as that reality is, by the season's end, Nell has come to terms with it.

Even after being digested by the house, she says she forgives her siblings for all of their mistakes before allowing the house to take hold of her. She sums it up when she says to Steve, "It wouldn't have changed anything. I need you to know that.

"Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely, and you loved me the same," she adds to her siblings. "That's all."
The Haunting of Hill House, Streaming now, Netflix

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'The Haunting of Hill House': How the Crain Siblings Represent the 5 Stages of Grief

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Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 1 of The Haunting of Hill House.] Netflix's hit series The Haunting of Hill House mixes family drama with some chilling horror for a scary good time. But the series goes beyond that with deep layered storytelling and direction that make it a masterpiece.

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Your "The Haunting Of Hill House" Questions Answered By Carla Gugino