The show’s chronology is scrambled, so only gradually, over ten episodes, through incrementally doled-out twists and flashbacks, do we find out exactly what happened. Twenty-five years ago, they all fled the mansion screaming, leaving their mother, Olivia, behind to die, supposedly from suicide but maybe from something worse. ![]() When the story starts, the five Crain siblings-know-it-all Steven, bossy Shirley, prickly Theodora, and the sweet twins, Luke and Nell-are hot, brooding basket cases, survivors of a summer that nobody wants to talk about. Mike Flanagan, the show’s creator, takes these ingredients-bad house, shy woman, blurry line between insanity and ghosts-and pours them into a fresh mold, transforming the neurotic adults of the study into a nuclear family, like that of “The Amityville Horror,” “Poltergeist,” and “Six Feet Under”-but also, and mainly, of NBC’s hit family drama “ This Is Us.” Jackson’s funny-nasty psychological thriller is about a very bad house, which is described in fabulously hyperbolic terms: Hill House is “arrogant and hating,” full of “sickening, degraded cold.” In the novel, we’re trapped not merely inside this malevolent architecture but in the mind of an unreliable mouseburger named Eleanor, a spinster whose sanity gets eaten away during her days at Hill House, where she’s gone to participate in a study about the paranormal. But there’s something existentially soul-dead to the over-all enterprise it has corn syrup in its veins instead of blood. The opening episodes of this interpretation of Shirley Jackson’s classic gothic-horror story were promisingly eerie, all shadows and inky blacks, and I crossed my fingers for something satisfying-a stylishly directed Halloween binge-watch, with a few decent jump scares. ![]() When I hit play on Netflix’s adaptation of “The Haunting of Hill House,” I didn’t expect to end up rooting for the house.
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