Is 'The Haunting Of Hill House' Mike Flanagan's 'Appetite For Destruction'?

By Petr Navovy | TV | February 2, 2024 |

By Petr Navovy | TV | February 2, 2024 |

Sometime around April 2020, I became a horror fan almost overnight. It was the first days of COVID lockdown, and I was sharing a tiny shoebox flat in the East End of London with my partner. One Friday, I came down with something. Testing wasn’t really widespread yet back then, so I never got it confirmed whether it was the dreaded COVID or not, but based on just how rotten I felt, I was convinced then—and am even more so now—that it must have been.

Lying there in a pool of sweat and desperate for some sort of distraction, my partner suggested that we could watch The Haunting of Hill House. She’d seen the Netflix horror show back when it came out in 2018 and loved it, and she thought it might do a good job of drawing me in enough so that the pain I was feeling became a bit more distant. In many ways, it was an odd choice: I’d made it clear a number of times that I wasn’t a horror fan; surely in the state I was in I’d need something I had a more natural, pre-existing affinity for?

But she insisted.

And I was too weak to fight back.

Thank god for that combination of factors!

That night, we watched Hill House until I passed out on the sofa. The next day, we carried on, making it through the entire series in minimal time. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. My poor, tired, probably-COVID-y eyes. I was astonished. What the hell was this show?! Where did it come from? Was all horror actually this good?

Fast forward to nearly four years later, and I now consider myself a bonafide horror fan. I’ve written about this journey before, but I don’t think I’ve explicitly credited Mike Flanagan with wrestling me out of my comfort zone and booting me up the backside to send me out the front door as if he was Gandalf and I a Baggins. Cheers, Mike!

Since making Hill House, Flanagan has gone on to become what many regard as the prime name in modern horror, directing a feature follow-up to one of the most respected horror films of all time, as well as continuing his dominance over television with an impressively regular output of shows that have come after 2018’s Hill House. As a reminder, since that bombshell, we’ve had 2020’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, 2021’s Midnight Mass, 2022’s Midnight Club, and, most recently, last year’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Four shows in four years, with only another year separating the first one from the rest of the streak. What a crazy run! It reminds me of Iron Maiden’s legendary Eighties period, in which they released seven iconic albums in nine years (actually eight albums if you count the live album—which you should, as it’s one of the greatest live albums of all time).

It’s such a shame, then, that while Flanagan’s output frequency is ludicrously prolific, the quality of that output has, at least in my humble opinion, been on a consistently downward trend since the release of Hill House. I’m fully aware that I’m in the minority on this—and it pains me to say it because I want the opposite to be the case—but as far as I’m concerned, each successive Flanagan TV project has been a bigger disappointment than the last. You’d think that after so many let downs in a row I’d have learned to not get my hopes up, but such is the titanic power of Hill House, dammit!, that I can’t help myself every single time.

The Haunting of Hill House really does remain a singular work of modern TV horror. A mesmerizing combination of visceral dread, genuine frights, and deep dives into each and every one of the story’s characters, that buries itself deep within your soul and refuses to leave. And those characters can’t be praised enough. With episodes of the show taking the time to focus in on each of the Crain family members and their processing of their shared trauma, the narrative weaves such a potent web of empathy that the horror—so expertly integrated as it is into things—almost becomes an incidental element. Sure, there’s a thrill to the ghosts and the hauntings and what not, but really I just want to give all of the characters a hug and make sure they’re okay!

Sadly, ever since then, it seems as if that emphasis on empathy and complex character work has taken a back seat to increasingly empty spectacle and self-conscious monologuing that takes you out of the narrative, dissolving and flattening so many characters into avatars of the author. And while the atmosphere conjured often remains intriguing and rich (Midnight Mass), those didactic tendencies can reach at-times unbearable levels (also Midnight Mass). It’s such a shame, because the makings of greatness are still there: Effective chills, visual panache, a recurring cast of excellent performers (no amount of Rahul Kohli is too much Rahul Kohli). Alas, one of the key elements of the creative equation—the writing—lets the rest of the project down each time.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe my expectations were set too high. This is, I suppose, the curse of making something so mind-bogglingly good as The Haunting of Hill House as your debut. If you’re going to follow that up with anything, it has to seriously impress. Mike Flanagan’s TV career since then has sadly been less Iron Maiden and more Guns N’ Roses. I still love Guns N’ Roses! ‘Use Your Illusion I’ and ‘II’ are great! They are! I just can’t help but compare everything to ‘Appetite For Destruction’. Can you blame me?