or the past month I've been watching movies about haunted houses: the
two Amityville Horror movies, three Conjuring movies,
and a few others. Then there's the one on some streaming site called
The Haunting Of Hill House. It was a rarity: for once we got a
movie that wasn't just disguised political propaganda.
It's a wonderfully depressing story, and watching this ten-hour movie full of people hanging themselves from balconies, doing autopsies on each other, carrying their dead little kids out of the house, and confessing their feelings of guilt to their psychiatrists—not to mention all that sappy sentimental music that pops up whenever somebody dies—is a great way to get rid of your will to live.
Some stories, like those by Joss Whedon, make me want to smack the writer upside the head. The writer gets us to care about the characters, then brutally kills them off just to play with our emotions. In this one the deaths are not so gratuitous, but this ten-hour tear-jerker / soap opera makes up for it by having more dead people than live ones. By the end the viewer envies them. Being dead looks not too bad, if you can stomach the “being insane for all eternity” part.
It differs from Amityville Horror, which has amusing scenes like a babysitter being so traumatized by getting locked in a closet she has to be carried out on a stretcher (Come on, what kid hasn't done something like that to their babysitter? Looking back, I kind of feel sorry for our babysitter, Christine. I never heard the word ‘brat’ used in so many ways in one sentence.)
In this one, there seems to be some problem with the space-time continuum. As one of the ghosts puts it, time is not a line but falls randomly like rain or snowflakes. At least she didn't say it droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven. To the viewer, it feels like it was the script that got droppeth and the producer just said “Screw it, we'll sort it out in post” and then forgot.
A good haunted house story has to be ambiguous about whether the ghosts are real or projections from our subconscious. The subconscious mind is somehow able to figure out things the person doesn't want to know, but since it can't talk it must tell us in some other way. Of course that's also what movies are supposed to do, and in that Hill House succeeds brilliantly. Even though it got a good score on Rotten Tomatoes—a sure sign of a stinker—it's actually very good.
The story
A married couple with five adorable little kids buys a huge run-down mansion full of mold with plans to flip it. It's obviously a lost cause and way too big for their budget. They start calling it their ‘forever house‘, ironically at first. Then the mother goes stark raving mad and commits suicide. The kids have no idea why and the father doesn't tell them.
The three-story cast-iron spiral staircase in Hill House. These things may look nice, but they're not safe. Somebody could easily fall off. I defy anybody to get a couch up those stairs without dying
The kids are all haunted by that terrible secret. By the time they reach adulthood, they're all dysfunctional: one is a heroin addict, one is a lesbian, one is psychotic, and one is a mystery writer. The little girl starts having episodes of sleep paralysis where she has menacing hallucinations about a dead woman. Then she's outside, earlier in her timeline, and the father shows up covered with blood. The police arrive and he tells her he'll be back by two o'clock. He shows up twenty-six years later at her funeral, which starts with everybody having hallucinations, flashbacks, flashbacks within hallucinations, and hallucinations within flashbacks, and ends with everyone getting drunk and fighting, then having even worse hallucinations and more flashbacks.
It turns out that the girl's hallucinations are actually premonitions, as the movie shows us. The events are shown out of sequence, as if the space-time continuum has broken into deadly shards. It's a dysfunctional family drowning in a world shattered by suicide.
Then we're at the beginning and the dad investigates why there's so much mold behind the wall in the basement. Thinking it was caused by rats, he buys a bottle of strychnine rat poison. He discovers that no, it's not rats, but something a lot bigger. After the police leave he leaves the bottle sitting there menacingly, which means, of course, that it's going to get used in the movie. Mercifully, we don't have to watch what its real symptoms would be. We're supposed to feel sympathy for the person who uses it, but the crime is so evil that it's almost impossible to watch.
The other kid, now a drug addict, leaves rehab and starts having hallucinations of his own, so he counts to seven over and over until they stop. Then he's a little boy learning to count to seven whenever something bad happens. The girl with sleep paralysis discovers a tea set in the house decorated with stars. Now an adult, psychotic and mentally unstable, she flushes her medication down the toilet and drinks tea from a mug decorated with stars. Then, just as she's about do something terrible, the film cuts back to her as a little girl. The effect is heartbreaking. They are the same soul. What she's doing, she's also doing to the innocent little girl.
There's one room in particular, which they call the “Red Room” because of its door, that has a mysterious attraction to them. In the book, the writer says the Red Room is “digesting” people. But in fact, they're just a typical American family where everybody rips each other apart and tries to destroy each other's self-esteem. The movie has a strong soap opera feel: the stuttering, the dramatic pauses, and the morbid obsession and guilt—my oh my, the guilt—about their feelings. There's a good reason why they're obsessed with Red Room, but it's too awful to discuss in a review.
The ghosts do as much talking as the living people do, if not more. They all share the nutty parent's delusion that the real world is a nightmare and dying is like waking up. At first the characters don't know whether the ghosts are real or whether they have all inherited a gene for insanity from their parent. In the end they decide they're real and the father, who may or may not have spent 26 years in prison (it's not clear) to protect his children from the truth, makes another huge sacrifice to protect them again.
Sleep paralysis
During a dream, the human body is paralyzed to prevent acting out the dream. Sleep paralysis occurs when a person wakes up before the paralysis, called atonia, wears off. They're often associated with frightening hallucinations of an evil human-like figure trying to suffocate them. A similar effect is when the person is trying to yell during a dream but is unable to speak because the vocal cords are paralyzed. The person then struggles to wake up, sometimes regaining the ability to speak just as the dream ends.
So, it's quite possible a hallucination would occur as a projection from someone's subconscious mind as it tried to show them the truth. And in a state of psychosis a person might well think dead people were beckoning him or her, and might even wish to join them. That ambiguity is balanced pretty well until the last few hours of the movie. Did I mention this thing goes on for ten hours?
The temporal nonlinearity is clever: it shows us that these adults have the same souls as when they were little. Humans develop a soul—a sense of self and a fundamental psychological makeup—during childhood. As you grow up, you learn how to lie, conceal your soul, and reason abstractly. But your soul is what you are. No matter what happens, you still have the same one you had as a child. Inside your head, you still see the world through the eyes of that little child. If you take drugs, you're really giving drugs to that little kid. If you kill yourself, you're really killing a little innocent child.
The story is also about places, what ‘houses’ symbolize to humans, and how people form attachments to a place. I suppose everyone feels attached to the place or the house where they grew up and wishes to return “home.” Maybe the author is saying that's what ghosts really are: the remains of emotions that were felt there.
Any place where something traumatic happens becomes tangled up with your soul, pulling you back to it. In the end, the characters, some of whom are now ghosts themselves, all return to the house and the Red Room, where that almost unimaginably evil event happened, and stay there forever. Not despite the horrors of what that room did to them, but because of them. It is their forever house.
If this weren't fiction, we'd say all these events could be explained by stress, mental illness, and mold toxins. Or maybe PFAS and microplastics. As the characters fall deeper into their parents' delusion, they gradually come to believe the ghosts are actual sentient beings. But this movie isn't really a ghost story at all; it's a story about haunted people, what it must be like to lose the ability to tell what is real, and how that would destroy the lives of those around them. That's a lot scarier than any haunted house.
may 31 2025, 5:26 am. minor updates june 02 and june 05 2025
