Hill House vs Hill House: two different kinds of hauntings

Hill House vs Hill House

Two Varieties of Haunting

Note: spoilers for both the 1959 novel and the 2018 miniseries.

In diverging so radically from Shirley Jackson’s classic book, the recent Netflix miniseries took a big risk — not merely in plot details, but in the very mechanics of its haunting. Nevertheless, it paid off. Jackson’s novel is most notable for bringing us a new and interesting take about the mechanics of haunting, and this miniseries ultimately has an equally interesting take.

The haunting in the novel is a prototype for invisible architecture — a bridge between Dreams in the Witch House and Ghostbusters. Hill House is not haunted by spirits, or by history. Instead, by way of a pathological deviation from architectural norms, it is a kind of psychic fun-house mirror. Depending upon your interpretation of the novel, the House either reflects and amplifies existing mental illnesses (and thus further disturbs the crew of neurotic and delusion-prone misfits who are visiting), or it accumulates and reflects psi in the form of poltergeist activity, (and thus turns the internal psychodrama of the crew of neurotic low-level telepaths and telekinetics into physical mayhem). The actual history of the House plays no more of a role in the hauntings than the elements of Nell’s stream of consciousness do, and only when the visitors are aware of that history. In a major break with the rest of the genre, Hill House has no memory.

Dropping a collection of misfits into the architectural equivalent of an extended LSD trip is dangerous — and, of course, the highly suggestible Nell gets the short end of the stick, as she completely lacks the ego barriers that the others assert so strongly. It’s not exactly the case that Nell channels the House, as the House has no consciousness, and no history; instead, Nell and the House merge into a kind of deranged group mind, in the same way that the left and right hemispheres of the brain (with their distinct personalities) merge together through the close communication of the corpus collosum to produce a distinct synthetic personality different from both of its component parts.

Hill House drives Nell to dysfunction and ultimately suicide. But, the House isn’t insane (the way that a person might be) but merely ‘not sane’: it’s a dysfunctional environment that creates dysfunctional patterns of behavior through poor layout, in the same way that imageboards and microblogging produce perverse social incentives through poor UI decisions. Where Hill House is sometimes described with animal metaphors — as hungry and alive — it is animate, and has teleology in the way modern audiences expect from software. It does not hunt its residents but merely warps their perception, making them feel hunted — something familiar to all Twitter users.

The miniseries throws this premise out almost entirely, in favor of a more traditional set of mechanics reminiscent of the first season of American Horror Story. While Hill House retains its twisted geometry, it is also a domain that twists time, allowing the dead to remain present,. and even to develop and grow. However, just as the title of the novel is misleading — it is the visitors who haunt Hill House, and each other — the title of the miniseries is misleading in a different way. Here the subject is the way Hill House haunts its former tenants, long after they leave. In other words, much like It, this series is about trauma.

The twistiness of Hill House’s geometry is explicitly more than three dimensions — not even four, but at least five. The red room is the “mirror room,” here: the red room digests the psyche of its inhabitant one at a time, by masquerading as some other kind of room, and it does this by becoming disjunctive in both 3 dimensional space and time. In other words, the red room is the weapon of trauma. And, like real trauma, details radiate both backward and forward in time: just as memories are affected during re-encoding by the circumstances surrounding recall (producing confabulations and other distortions), the twistiness of space and time in Hill House allows a conversation between future and past events — something represented in the series by Oculus-style flashbacks, mismatched conversations, and actual time jumps in the style of The Stars My Destination.

The shared trauma rockets a loving family into decades of dysfunction. This is another notable thematic divergence from the novel: in the book Nell’s psychic openness is a liability and other characters remain functional primarily because of their ability to isolate themselves, in the series, Nell is ultimately the most functional member of the family because of her willingness to communicate, and it is a series of communication failures and a distrust of her own intuition that ultimately kills her. Olivia takes on Nell’s role as the figure possessed by the House, but it’s her desire to build up barriers to protect her children that gets weaponized. In the novel, communication is a dangerous necessity; in the series, failures of communication — particularly well-meaning attempts to protect people by withholding information — is the downfall of the family, who could have gotten over their trauma by working together.

Atomization against the danger of dysfunctional communication is a running theme in some of Jackson’s work: we might also look to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, where a kind of folie-au-deux develops between sisters who have isolated themselves from society, one of whom had already murdered most of the family with strychnine, and where the climax involves the sisters faking their own death by burning their own house down, using this excuse to exit society entirely. A closer adaptation of the novel might have played up this element, and put the danger of filter bubbles front and center. However, in a way, this adaptation managed to handle both the danger of isolated communities, and the danger of atomization. As the family has grown apart, each of them has become part of a distinct set of cultural models, expectations, and norms, so when they come together as individuals they also bridge communities. This slightly-on-the-nose anti-wall rhetoric gains some nuance when we consider each character as a representative of a whole community.

While the denoument’s montage of patched-up marriages and removed social barriers is perhaps a little saccharine, this at least prevents casual viewers from totally missing the theme. Nobody can reasonably mistake this for a series about a haunted house, the way so many people mistook the novel as being about the question of whether or not Nell was merely mentally ill.

Both the novel and the miniseries are more politically relevant than ever; two truly distinct takes on the things that haunt us, both worth revisiting today.