The Haunting of Hill House and the Illusion of Space

Written by Marta Anielska

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 that the failure to connect is due to the emotional isolation created by the narrative isolation of each of the Crains’ experiences. Throughout the episode, the shot will focus on one of the siblings while others are having conversations in the background; their communication is blurry and disconnected compared to the loneliness they feel. Consequently, Theo is a visual focus of the episode since the isolation of her narrative led her to touch Nell’s dead body and absorb the horrors she faced, leaving her emotionally numb. Many shots linger on her as her siblings bicker in the behind her. Wide, sweeping shots also make one room feel much larger than it is, showing how the vast emptiness of Hill House is hardly necessary to make a space feel daunting. Despite theoretically having escaped the house, the siblings continue to drag around its weight.

Filling the Gaps

Tension is, however, not built through the audience’s knowledge of the physical and emotional space between the Crains; rather, it’s created by the suggestion that space is not really empty. This is most literally clear through how the camera lingers on empty spaces in Hill House once characters have already left a room. Consequently, the audience suspects that something might actually be there, even if it is not presently visible. Moreover, as a convention of the horror genre, it specifically makes the audience expect a jump scare; the subversion of that expectation ironically leaves them even more confused and tense. This effect is cleverly woven into the narrative which takes place when the Crains are adults, and shots that have two of the siblings on opposite sides of the room are yet again used to suggest a presence of tension rather than an absence. The bottle episode crystallizes this concept because Nelly, invisible in the past and dead in the present, stands in the background as her family descends into chaos. In both cases, she is a representation of everything that is unsaid between her siblings, and when secrets start to be revealed, the camerawork swoops in to narrow down the space, spinning dizzily around arguing characters as though they themselves have stepped into the tension Nelly’s ghostly appearance represents.

At first, the bottle episode seems like a collision course; having aired all their secrets, the Crains fail to reconcile their narratives and fall into disrepair. Instead, it forces all the Crains towards the climax which, inevitably, must occur in a confrontation of Hill House. They confront their trauma together, all ending up in the red room — one of the greatest mysteries of Hill House — and fending for their lives with the help of Nelly, the only Crain that has tried to weave their narratives together time and time again. The episode comes with a startling revelation: the Crain siblings have all been in the red room before. During their stay in the house as children, the majority of the Crains had retreated to separate rooms when wanting to be alone — but all these rooms had simply been the red room, shifting and adapting to create an illusion of space. Despite feeling the vastness of the house and the individual siblings’ experiences differing so much, the siblings had all, ultimately, inhabited the exact same space. Rather than empty space being filled with horrors as the show’s camerawork suggests, it is simply inhabited by other humans. The Crains just had to realize that was the case to take away the house’s power.

Conclusion

The Haunting of Hill House works both as a story that evokes our greatest fears and one that comments on the nature of fear itself. None of the siblings know exactly what happened, and all of them fear that whatever happened in the past might come back. That fear can only be perpetuated when we blind ourselves through the limitation of a sole perspective and ignore the importance of shared experience. When humans share experience, they quickly become aware that the space that could be filled by that which is terrifying and deadly can also house that which is familiar and comforting.

Work Cited

The Haunting of Hill House, season one. Created by Mike Flanagan, Netflix Inc., 2018