The Haunting of Hill House and the Illusion of Space Written by Marta Anielska1,2 1 Department of English, Department of French, University of Toronto 2 Third-year undergraduate of University College, University of Toronto Throughout the 2018 Netflix mini-series The Haunting of Hill House, the titular building looms over the narrative, large, decrepit, and empty. Though every member of the Crain family is traumatized by their brief stay in the house, that trauma is compounded by the isolated narratives they have constructed. The characters maintain their narratives by denying that the house may have not been as empty as it seemed, and through a belief that no other family member truly understands what happened that summer. As the narratives of the Crain siblings converge, the house is exposed as a malignant figure that manipulates physical space to create emotional space that drives a wedge between the families it targets. The convergence of this narrative, consequently, becomes the mechanism by which the Crain siblings save their family, demonstrating how human isolation is a construct formed by trauma.
A Fractured Narrative The first few episodes of the show quickly establish the physical and emotional space created between the Crains by their trauma, most obviously from the fact that half of the siblings live on the east coast of the United States and the other lives on the west. Though siblings often grow apart over time, the narrative style focuses each episode on a single sibling’s experience with the house and consequent trauma. Each sibling’s perception of their time at Hill House is at odds with the fact that the time they spent there and their mother’s suicide was a shared experience that only creates a coherent sequence of events when combined. This is especially true of Steven and Nell, the siblings with the largest age gap. While the former remembers their mother’s state slowly deteriorating over time, Steven interprets her decline as mental illness without Nell’s direct knowledge of the ghosts of Hill House. As a result, even the siblings that live close to each other have an oddly distant relationship. For example, Theo living in Shirley’s guest house, separated from the main family, feels more like a cold courtesy one would extend to an acquaintance rather than any warm familial bond. To both characters, the other is someone that they know instead of someone that actively plays a part in the narrative of their lives. The oddly formal and distant relationship between the Crain siblings becomes even more obvious when they are forced together by Nelly’s death. The sixth episode, titled “Two Storms,” which marks the halfway point in the series and instrumentalizes the ‘bottle episode’ trope, eliminating the physical distance between the Crains; however, it also makes clear that bridging any kind of emotional distance will be much harder. Even when in the same room, the camerawork of the episode reveals Screenwriters’ Perspectives Vol. 3 No. 1 2022
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