THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is a Netflix miniseries loosely adapted from the book by Shirley Jackson. It was created by horror maestro Mike Flanagan (OCULUS, GERALD’S GAME), who also directed every episode.

It revolves around the Crain family who, as children, lived in a haunted house where their mother died. None of them, save their father, know exactly how it happened. THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE begins with them, as adults, each having gone down separate paths. A shocking death forces them back together and to finally confront the unspoken, looming horror in their lives: Hill House.

Notably, each of the first five episodes focuses on one of the siblings, in age order. Steven, the sceptic (Michiel Huisman); Shirley, the mortician (Elizabeth Reaser); Theo (Kate Siegel), a child psychologist; Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a drug addict; Luke’s twin sister Nell (Victoria Pedretti).

Mike Flanagan explains why the unique structure of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE could only have happened on television:

It was a very complex structure and that’s something that television, I think, allows for in a way that you never get an opportunity to do in a feature film. Shows like LOST and WESTWORLD had already played around with timelines so beautifully that it was just, we can go for it and tell the story in the way that we think is going to be the most compelling as opposed to trying to hold someone’s hand through a linear storyline.

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