‘The Haunting of Hill House’ Recap: ‘Steven Sees a Ghost’

Written by John Edward Betancourt 

THIS IS THE EMERGENCY SPOILER ALERT SYSTEM...YOU ARE ADVISED TO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...

While the horror genre, and all the various monsters that roam within it, bring me great joy on a regular basis, there are some creatures that I tend to steer clear of in that vast and unsettling universe. Not out of terror mind you, but due to the sheer fact that they outright rarely scare me. Vampires for example really don’t send chills down my spine and the same often applies to ghost stories. That doesn’t mean those two sub-genres are bad or dumb by any means, because people love them through and through, they simply do little for me. Ghost stories for instance, tend to rely on jump scares or forced moments in order to terrify their audience but I need a little more than that.
 
Which means I’m often on the hunt for ghost stories that manage to truly manipulate the human psyche, and find ways to unsettle the audience and well, flat out scare the ever-living daylights out of us, but alas, my search has yielded little results. But, once I heard that Writer/Director Mike Flanagan, the same creative mind that managed to make Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game a creepy and disturbing affair on Netflix, had been commissioned to help adapt Shirley Jackson’s iconic horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House into a series for the network, well my ears perked up. Because Flanagan’s adaptation of Gerald’s Game gave the story new depth and subtext that I didn’t expect to find, and it was genuinely terrifying, and if he was able to do that with the master’s work, what would he do with a classic such at this?
 
Well it would seem that the answer to that question, is to provide us with one scary series since the first episode in this saga, ‘Steven Sees a Ghost’, delivers in spades when it comes to the creep out factor. In fact, the opening minutes of this series premiere are incredibly unsettling for reasons I will do my best not to spoil because you need to see it to believe it. But, this opening chapter in what is clearly going to be a horrifying saga offers far more than just epic scares and squirmy moments, it also provides us with some quality and dynamic characters as well and that’s what I enjoyed most about this episode, the fact that we got to know more about this family and how the haunting in question changed the course of their lives forever. 

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In fact, the character development in this opening episode is equally as impressive as the scares it provides us with because the story takes its sweet time to properly introduce us to every single member of the Crain family, to the point where are able to learn everything we need to know about them over the course of a single hour and well, every single one of them are fascinating and dynamic because of this writing decision and seeing them as adults, rattled by what happened in that house, only deepens the mystery of what happened there and it leaves you hungry to know exactly what went down behind those walls all those years ago since so many members of this family are shattered by their experiences at Hill House.
 
However, as I made mention of earlier, there’s some serious scares to be found in this one, and we need to talk about the scare factor in this recap because, how it’s handled is downright magnificent. Because while the ghost scenes are creepy in their own right, by setting this in ‘present day’ so to speak, and having the characters actively question whether or not their experiences in that house were products of their imagination or indeed a ghostly surprise, takes you completely off your guard. You start to wonder if this series is going to be an exploration of something far more human, like trauma that the family may have experienced at the hands of their late mother since it’s established here that she may have been mentally ill and that illness may have caused more harm than good. But all of that, is mere misdirection and it makes the closing moments of this episode all the more powerful and all the more terrifying and trust me, that finale cements the fact that we are dealing with something supremely supernatural here.
 
In fact, that manipulation did such a good job of drawing me away from the scare factor, that I outright jumped in my seat and yelped when the big surprise arrived and well, it’s clear that my search for a scary and quality ghost story has come to an end for the time being, because The Haunting of Hill House is the real deal and if this what the first episode has to offer, I can only imagine what other horrors are going to present themselves in the other episodes that I now have queued up. Either way, I’m definitely hooked, and anxious to feel my heart racing once more, which means it’s high time to hit ‘play next episode’ on my Netflix app, and return to the horror that is Hill House. Until next time.   

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