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Over time, Olivia becomes convinced that the world outside Hill House is both a figurative and literal nightmare. The only way to save the twins, she decides, is to kill them, keeping them safely ensconced in Hill House forever. Netflix is home to two of our favorite haunted house shows—and more could be on the way.
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First came The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan's radical re-envisioning of Shirley Jackson's book of the same name. The Haunting of Bly Manor, out October 9, works with Henry James' famous works of horror, most notably A Turn of the Screw. 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.
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Steven (Michiel Huisman) is a best-selling author of books about the paranormal, selling his history for cash. Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) runs a funeral home. Theo (Kate Siegel), prone to wearing dark gloves for supernatural reasons, is a psychiatrist helping troubled children. Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is a junkie and Nell (Victoria Pedretti) is being lured back to Hill House for the sort of final confrontation the genre demands. 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.
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Unlike Hill House's other ghosts, Nell's actually trying to save people, and she's willing to travel through time to do it. At some point, William bricked himself up in Hill House's basement and died there, leaving his body for Hugh to discover decades later. Poppy's daughter passed away due to illness. Her son ended up in a wheelchair, and could only communicate by pounding on the walls.
He's the only one who doesn't believe in ghosts. Why tell him the truth, not to mention charge him with upholding Hugh and the Dudleys' secret deal? The monologue that Steven gives while trying to reconcile with his wife holds the answers.
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Every single one of those things has a story attached, and for all of his faults, Steven is the family storyteller. With Hugh dead, Steven is both the family patriarch and the person best-equipped to keep the Crains' story alive. As it turns out, Olivia just wanted to be a good mom. See, as it turns out, if you die in Hill House your spirit is stuck there for eternity, and the mansion seems dead set on collecting as many souls as possible. The house bombards Olivia with images of her two youngest kids, twins Nell and Luke, in trouble.

You can throw all the rhetorical questions you want at the show. What sticks with you at the end of those 10 hours is not what rings discordant but what seems eerily relatable — the scorched-earth arguments, and silent treatments, and sibling alliances, and foxhole bonding that constitutes being in a family. We all have ghosts, even if they aren’t as vengeful or CGI-rendered as the Crains’ personal (and perhaps literal) demons. At its best, i.e. the majority of its run, Flanagan’s subjective take on Jackson’s source material strikes bone by reiterating the idea that every family has its own ghost stories.
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Hill House's caretakers, the Dudleys, have a daughter about Luke's age. However, the girl isn't allowed to visit Hill House. In fact, Mrs. Dudley rarely lets the child leave home at all. Haunting may not be around the corner—but another Flanagan project is. Production on Flanagan's next Netflix horror series, Midnight Mass, began in August.
It is loosely based on the 1959 novel and the first season consists of ten episodes. The series was released on October 12, 2018. All four of the inhabitants begin to experience strange events while in the house, including unseen noises and ghosts roaming the halls at night, strange writing on the walls and other unexplained events. Listed in a The New York Times poll in 2018 as “the scariest book of fiction” by participants, the novel is a must read for all the fans of horror and mystery genres.
Eleanor tends to experience phenomena to which the others are oblivious. At the same time, Eleanor may be losing touch with reality, and it is implied that at least some of what Eleanor witnesses may be products of her imagination. Another implied possibility is that Eleanor possesses a subconscious telekinetic ability that is itself the cause of many of the disturbances experienced by her and the others, which might indicate there is no ghost in the house at all.
Easter eggs and references aside, The Haunting of Hill House has no qualms about taking one of Shirley Jackson's best-known works and giving its authorship to a man (although, let's be honest, Steven is exactly the kind of guy who'd steal a woman's story to advance his own career). Still, while The Haunting of Hill House might've done its best to erase Jackson's accomplishments, her words still play a big part in the series, especially in the show's opening and closing moments. As it turns out, however, "The Grattan Murders" is an Easter egg, albeit a pretty odd one. Not only does the poem appear in Shirley Jackson's original novel, the author used to sing it to her children before bed. Yes, a litany of grisly murders makes for an odd way to lull kids to sleep, but Jackson wasn't exactly a normal mother. See, in addition to writing horror stories and raising four children, Jackson was also a devoted occultist.
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. For a horror story, Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House doesn't have a typical ending. Then again, the Crain family's stately manor isn't a typical haunted house, either. Oh, Hill House is stuffed full of more spirits, spectres, and ghoulies than any other structure in television history, but they're not the bad guys. The house itself is, and that changes everything. Two decades later, the Crains are estranged from Hugh (Timothy Hutton, whose age gap with Thomas is math best ignored) and they’re each scarred in their own way.