What I’m Watching: The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix)

This is weird. A series based very loosely on Shirley Jackson’s great book (more likely for the writers, the 1963 movie The Haunting or the shitty ’90s remake).

The builders/founders of the house, the Crains, and the scientist ghost-hunters of the book, are here replaced by house-flippers with five children in flashback to the ’80s(?). In middle flashbacks of the ’00s, one boy becomes a ghost-hunter, one a junkie, one girl a mortician, one girl is useless, one a mousy little housewife. In present day, the plot moves forward. Sometimes the time is obvious from the characters in a scene, sometimes it’s hard to tell which flashback is which, and the characters’ clothing and accessories are not distinctive (fashion died in the ’90s and never recovered). It’s good that they have iPhones and iPads in the present, because those make it possible to date the scene.

Everyone seems pretty resigned to seeing ghosts or at least having hallucinations on a regular basis. OH NO the walls are banging in an old house, must be ghosts. OH NO my dead SPOILER is here where they were expected and now ghosts.

Long tracts of “dramatic” footage which aren’t good enough for “reality” TV are painfully uncut here, I’m 2 eps in and it feels like it’s been 12. The movie was so much better at getting to the point (that secrets and madness will make you see anything, even/especially if there’s something to be seen). But there’s scenes which are effective, where the oppression of Hill House works, where it actually creeped me out. The actors range from reasonably good (Stephen, Shirley), to stiff and unlikable (“Dad”, and whoever the middle daughter is, I keep forgetting that she’s even in this and then I go “wait, who’s the other brunette?”), to bland caricature (the Dudleys).

★★★☆☆