The Haunting of Hill House is really great.
I know many people won’t watch it because they think it’s horror, but it’s no more horror than The Leftovers is. In many ways — to its great benefit — it resembles The Leftovers as it’s all about the stories we tell each other, why they matter, and how we exist in other people’s minds and memories and understandings. We are, to paraphrase and expand on something Nell said in the story, confetti that’s spread out across the universe, a confetti of discontinuous moments and cognizances and ideas that equal our totality — a totality that is not just held within us but is contained in other people and in our actions radiating into the world.
The show is also about our interiority and our perceptions as they relate to others — how one moment and one experience can be one thing to one one person and something completely different to someone else and that it’s probably worth more of our effort to consider that, to attempt to understand that — that this comprehension might be the key to some deeper reality.
The show is also about something I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately, and that Shirley Jackson (the author of the novel on which the series is based) was also considering in the novel: that the irrational is absolutely critical to exist in this universe as sane beings. Jackson’s “absolute realism” or as the show changes it “absolute reality” is inimical to our continued existence; depressives and the suicidal experience that absolute reality, and react to it rationally. The show, then, expands on this and essentially says that the darkness is inevitable, yes, but we still can string lights in that darkness and even if oblivion is our fate, there is value yet in those lights, those moments — they don’t diminish in worth because they are evanescent, but rather are worth all the more for their transience.
And, finally, Hill House is all about how the past sometimes — oftentimes — is just as actual and as real as the present or the future. That even when you think it’s not, the past is right there with us, standing just behind us, holding our hand in the dark and whispering in our ears. It never goes away and those moments of the past (to paraphrase Nell again) fall all around us all the time like snow.
The ending is gutting and elegant and really just perfect. No spoilers here; just watch. It is very much worth your time to hear all of their stories and why they matter. Then you’ll know more of your story, too.