Is this the scariest new show on TV?
Is it a horror story? A drama? Or a clever combination of both that might just be defining a new genre of television. Certainly, you will scream and question why you’re watching it alone in the dark.
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Is it a horror story? A drama? Or a clever combination of both that might just be defining a new genre of television — the scream drama or “scrama” for short.
Certainly, you will scream and question why you’re watching The Haunting Of Hill House alone in the dark, but the depth and development of the characters are what you’d find in a gripping drama.
Based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name, the series follows Hugh and Olivia Crain who, in the early 1990s, move their five young children into a rundown old mansion with plans to renovate and flip it. But the creepy, yet strangely beautiful, house holds deep, dark secrets and is home to a host of supernatural residents who terrify and traumatise the five Crain kids — especially young twins Nell and Luke.
The Netflix series features Games Of Thrones star Michiel Huisman, Twilight’s Elizabeth Reaser, British actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who starred in the Australian production The Secret River, and Academy Award winner Timothy Hutton.
Switching between the present day and their time in Hill House, the show explores the tragic impact the experience had on the family and the ghosts that have continued to haunt some of them in the 26 years since they were forced out after a final horrible incident that changed their lives forever.
Jackson-Cohen, who plays present day Luke, agrees with Insider that this is like no other show on the market, a new genre that will both scare the pants off people, but also invite them to invest in relatable characters.
“It’s easy to just be sold as a horror show but I think the show is so much more than that and I think that’s what drew us all to it, the fact that it was taking this idea and actually creating something completely original with it,” he says.
He adds that it wasn’t the intention of creator and director Mike Flanagan — known for horror flicks such as Oculus, Hush and Before I Wake — to make just a 10-part scream-a-thon, but admits the scary bits are … well, pretty scary.
“I remember Mike saying early on ‘I don’t do jump scares’ because they’re seen as a cheap trick in horror,” he says.
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“But it’s so interesting that when something does scare you, it really does terrify you.”
And after just a few days of being available to stream, viewers are taking to Twitter in droves to share just how much they are being terrified.
“On episode 5 of haunting of hill house & i might have to watch a disney movie before i go to sleep,” one Twitter user writes.
“I binge watched haunting of hill house instead of studying and that show gave me 10000 heart attacks and infinite nightmares omg sucha good show tho!!!!” says another.
Even Stephen King, the master of fear himself, wasted little time checking out Hill House and took to Twitter to deliver his verdict: “I don’t usually care for this kind of revisionism, but this is great. Close to a work of genius, really,” he wrote in part.
It’s obvious early on in the series that the scars from the family’s time in the mansion have manifested in each of the family members in very different ways. It is in this part of the storyline that Flanagan carefully explores a number of topics that require sensitivity but also make the Haunting of Hill House much more relatable to viewers than a typical horror story would be.
“He’s written these characters that are hugely relatable,” Jackson-Cohen says. “Out of all the five siblings it’s touching on suicide, it’s touching on addiction, it’s touching on denial, all of these things.
“I think when you’re grounding something in such reality, it becomes a lot more accessible for an audience and through that the scares become heightened because you’re invested in this very real, tangible situation.”
Playing such characters come with a responsibility to get it right and to sensationalise or play lip service to their weaknesses.
Huisman says that weighed on them during the filming of the first season.
“That’s the kind of thing that will drive you insane if you let it because we want it to be authentic,” Huisman says. “That’s the way to make people care about these characters. The horror or the scare part works well if we ground it in real people.”
Twilight’s Reaser, who plays eldest daughter Shirley, connected with her character more than she had any other she has portrayed on the screen.
“I feel like Shirley now is inside me,” Reaser says. “Usually I’m very unsentimental about these things and once I’m done I like never think about it ever again and then this thing, it’s truly stayed with me.”
Oliver-Cohen was a little concerned before the show dropped on Netflix that audiences might be expecting something it wasn’t.
“A lot of people will want to tune in for a cheap scare and may be disappointed by the fact there isn’t that immediate pay-off for them, that they have to stick with it longer,” he says. “So it’s going to be really interesting to see how an audience takes to it.”
Looks like he had nothing to be scared about.