Sure, the threat of ghosts and demons popping into your room could be creepy. The urban legends found in every small town can feel particularly eerie once October rolls around. And it’s probably not a smart idea to fall down a Wikipedia wormhole about famous serial killers just before heading to bed. But what is it that really keeps us up at night, no matter what time of year it is? That’s right: childhood trauma!
Shirley Jackson understood this when she published The Haunting of Hill House in 1959. Robert Wise was intrigued enough by this theme to draw them out even more with The Haunting in 1963,. And, now, Mike Flanagan has proven to understand just how scary particularly upsetting memories can be — and his latest horror project fits right at home in the television landscape of 2018.
No matter what channel or streaming service you turn to, mental illness plays a big role on the small screen. Shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Bojack Horseman explicitly deal with how mental illness impacts our lives on a day-to-day basis, offering sensitive, fact-based looks at borderline personality disorder and alcoholism, respectively. Other shows deal with this more implicitly: Marvel’s Jessica Jones, for example, used mind-control as a metaphor for sexual assault, while HBO’s Sharp Objects dressed up misogyny and child abuse into a Southern Gothic yarn that could be enjoyed as a who-done-it just as much as it can be analyzed on a scholarly level. TV writers seem genuinely interested in exploring deeper themes about mental health through genre fiction, and audiences are eating it all up.
Flanagan’s spin on the Hill House follows suit, through an almost irresistible elevator pitch: what happens when kids who were raised in a haunted house grow up? It’s the sort of premise that sounds so simple, yet stands out as an idea never really explored on screen. But he doesn’t stop there in his quest to create an addictive television experience, lifting the best parts of some of TV’s biggest hits to keep audiences hooked.
He offers tantalizing clues about the family’s past at a perfect pace, a la This Is Us. And he peppers his series with compelling flashbacks that quickly become the highlight of each episode — a page lifted right from Orange is the New Black. But, most importantly, he quickly introduces a Lost-esque story device that tells the protagonists that they “have to go back” to the home from their nightmares, forcing them to confront demons both figurative and literal.
Exploring deeper societal issues through horror is nothing new. Frankenstein was about the dangers of playing God in science; Dracula was about sexual repression upon its original publication and in most (good) adaptations of the novel. More recently, Rosemary’s Baby explored the effects of rape and gas-lighting, while The Living Dead franchise explored everything from racism to commercialism. Most recently, of course, Get Out proved to be the definitive film about implicit racism in modern America. So, while naysayers (and fraidy-cats) might chalk the whole genre up to nothing more than shock and cheap scares, there is a long history of deeper themes being explored within the pages and reels of horror storytelling.
But, by the nature of its premise, Hill House feels decidedly modern and wide-ranging in the themes it explores. While many forums have offered theories about what the five main characters represent, it doesn’t seem like Flanagan is trying to hide anything from the audience: the Crain siblings are victims of trauma. Not only did they spend a long segment of their formative years living in a terrifying mansion, but they witnessed their father and mother’s marriage violently crumble, and were left without answers as to what actually happened between them both. As adults, these memories manifest in ways that feel all too real, surprisingly nuanced, and tinged with the supernatural in just the right way.
Perhaps the most obvious blur between supernatural and realistic PTSD comes through Luke (Julian Hilliard as the kid, Oliver Jackson-Cohen as the adult), the impossibly cute youngest boy in the Crain family who becomes, if we’re being honest, the best-looking heroin addict on any screen, big or small. Using drugs to cope with a traumatizing experience is a common trope — it has been explored to death in everything from Oscar-winning prestige pictures to Lifetime movies.
But Hill House is not interested in taking the same road as those movies; in this series, drugs are quite literally used as a tool to keep Luke from seeing the spirits he was so terrified of catching glimpses of as a child. Whenever Luke is tempted to relapse, he’s stalked by demonic entities who appear in the corners of frames and get closer as the different scenes reach their climax. Flanagan places a direct correlation between Luke’s drug use and his ability to see ghosts, turning the character into something new.
Meanwhile, the older children are affected by their childhoods in ways that feel both natural for teens that grew up in a troubled home and kids exposed to something terrifying at a young age. Steven (Michael Huisman), who holds the most resentment towards his family, had a clearly strong bond with his mother: they talk religion and quote Shakespeare together, and he even makes her a mirror as a present. But their relationship starts to crumble just as his parents start fighting and his father alienates him in an effort to keep him from the unsettling aspects of Hill House.
Steven, like many children from broken homes, ties these things together: his worsening relationship with his father is the obvious cause of his mother’s deteriorating mental health. But, more notably, he covers his eyes on the scariest night at Hill House, preventing him from ever fully understanding what happens behind his parents, as well as what supernatural beings were haunting those halls. His general apathy and complete disbelief in the supernatural his siblings and, more importantly, his father claim to have experience make sense — it’s a byproduct of the resentment he feels towards everyone for ruining his loving bonds with his parents.
Similarly, older sister Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) is shown throughout the flashbacks as a caregiver. In scenes both comedic and serious, she has one of her younger siblings thrust upon her and is forced to care for them, with her own youth and need for affection disregarded. Sometimes these moments are met with a sitcom-y “aww shucks,” such as when she’s made to play with Nell. Other times — like at the final night on Hill House — it’s traumatic, as she’s tasked with calming down her siblings while also being given no comfort from the adults in her life. This explains adult Shirley’s desperate need to maintain composure and order. She hates the idea of a Luke, while high on drugs, being seen at Nell’s wedding and embarrassing the family.
Later, she’s obsessed with organizing the funeral for a loved one, refusing to leave her family’s reputation in the hands of another. But, most importantly, she’s mortified at the fact that her brother would air their family’s dirty laundry to the world through a book. Compared to her siblings, Shirley appears the most adjusted to what she experienced as a kid. But, she clearly hasn’t processed it all, and does not want others (even loved ones) to know about the things that plague her.
But it’s Theo (Kate Siegel) and Nell (Victoria Pedretti) — the two characters who, in a sense, appear in the original work that inspired the series — that create the strongest link between supernatural trauma and the impact of real-world abuse.
Nell has the most traumatic experience in Hill House: she’s tormented by the “Bent-Neck Lady.” Despite seeing this specter every day, she can’t convince her family of its existence. Furthermore, it follows her out of Hill House and into her adult life, long after her siblings stopped (openly) discussing the supernatural events that plagued her youth. Things change when she meets her husband — a man who can’t quite relate to her trauma, since he didn’t go through it, but empathizes with her and, perhaps more importantly, believes in her trauma.
While Nell ultimately meets a tragic fate, in a supernatural twist that doesn’t exactly fit nicely within the broader mental health theme being explored, the first move that starts striking down the dominoes to her death is the isolation she’s made to feel by her siblings. Her trauma and its lasting impact are dismissed, outright ignored, or taken advantage of. While not every victim of violence can relate to the supernatural elements to her story, there is a thread of truth that connects this story to more realistic examples.
Theo, meanwhile, offers the most unconventional ripple effect of trauma, but one that feels all too familiar for queer people like her. For a victim of a spooky haunting, Theo seems relatively well-adjusted — she has a good relationship with all of her siblings, gets an education, and seems fulfilled with her job as a social worker. But, independent of her trauma, she also has psychic abilities (just like her counterpart in Jackson’s novel and Wise’s film). These abilities are constantly present and, at times, overwhelming, particularly as a kid, but can be quelled with the help of gloves, which give her the ability to reveal or use her powers at her own choosing, around whoever she wants. And, while that might be useful to her as a child, it has a lasting impact on her adult life, as she struggles to make connections with those around her, and feels completely isolated. On a supernatural level, it’s why her nightmares involve her being alone, or that the scariest thing to happen to her over the course of the season is the simple fact that she’s made to feel empty because of her abilities.
But, on a more realistic level, we see how her powers make her uncomfortable when a one-night stand shows an interest in building a relationship. This level of isolation is something felt by many LGBTQ+ people: there’s a loneliness to being queer, and the defense mechanisms we use as children to protect ourselves from a world that might be unkind can make it difficult for us to reach out of our shells as adults. For Flanagan to explore this through a supernatural lens requires an incredible amount of nuance that he’s somehow able to supply.
A common complaint about The Haunting of Hill House is that its final episode is sappy. True, it might seem strange to end a scary series with shots of a family gathered around a birthday cake and a heartwarming moment where a woman reunites with the soul of her dead daughter. But… I have to wonder if Flanagan is even really interested in telling a ghost story. Sure, this is a ghost story, and a scary one at that. It is a horror series, through-and-through.
But… it’s also one of the most compelling family dramas in recent memory, and a thorough examination of how trauma trickles through our lives. There are certain tropes we see of children from broken homes: they become drug addicts or withdrawn; overprotected or intensely isolated. We’ve seen all these tropes before… but never like this, and rarely explored with such sensitivity and care. We want to root for the Crain children… and, by the end of the season, we want to thank Mike Flanagan for bringing yet another empathetic tale about mental health into our lives this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9OzG53VwIk&t=10s
