The Haunting Of Hill House

Netflix, now streaming

he Haunting Of Hill House might just be the biggest TV surprise of the year. The ten-parter is, on the one hand, a traditional horror story with a creepy house populated by apparitions around every corner. But it’s also a profound study of trauma and its effect on one extended family. The series follows the fashion of all prestige TV dramas at the moment by constantly jumping around in time, cutting from sequences of the five Crain siblings in the present day to their time as kids in the creepy Hill House when things started to go very wrong, especially for their mother. But in this case, the parallel timelines aren’t just a contrived gimmick, they are the key to the whole saga. The past haunts these people and never lets go.

At first, I found the storytelling a tad confusing

Twith so many characters to keep track of. But once I stopped worrying about who’s who and let the unfolding narrative take hold, I was held in its extraordinary spell for all ten stunning hours. Episode six, filmed in just a few lengthy takes, when the whole family gathers for the first time for years, is a particularly stunning tour de force.

Hideous apparitions like “the Bent-neck Lady” scare the wits out of us, but the real horror is psychological, as the effect of past tragedy impacts each sibling in distressing ways. Writer/director Mike Flanagan has pulled off an incredible trick – making us care about his characters as much as he chills us with the terror of their situation. In case you haven’t managed to binge on this horror masterpiece yet, I won’t spoil the ending, except to say the biggest surprise is just how moving it is.