But the start feels like a series of misdirections-a bumpy beginning into what turns out to be a richly fleshed out character world. Spoiler: the series does get much better. I turned it off soon after Steve’s interviewee’s monologue, only to go back upon encouragement from a few others, and most importantly you. I’d love to know what watching Flanagan’s pilot felt like for those who hadn’t read Jackson’s novel, but I found it deeply disorienting, and partly because I was expecting more of a straightforward adaptation. There’s a sort of double-take quality to the first 15 minutes of the series, which moves from cold-open flashback to a long abstract credit sequence and then finally to the present, where Steve (one of the show’s five protagonist siblings) is interviewing a potential subject for his next book on paranormal activity. Obviously, I clicked play-but with trepidation! The 1963 Robert Wise film adaptation is already so good, and the novel is, like, not very long? So I wasn’t completely sure how Flanagan was going to draw this out across 10 episodes.Īnd, to be honest, if I were Flanagan, I’m not sure I would have begun the pilot that way.
As someone who loves the novel (I think it’s the thing I’ve read the most, second maybe to James’s “Daisy Miller” lol), it’s a disconcerting image. Jane Hu: Phil, I have to admit that when I first came across the advertisement for this series on my Netflix dashboard, my immediate response was…not excitement. There’s so much to say! Has Michiel Huisman overtaken Aaron Eckhart in Possession as the most preposterous approximation of a “writer” in contemporary media? How did this casting director locate so many different women who look like they could plausibly be the daughters of Carla Gugino? And how did Jessica Paré miss out?īut we should start with you, Shirley Jackson aficionado that you are: what’d you think of Mike Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House ?
Phil Maciak: Jane, when I saw that Netflix was adapting The Haunting of Hill House as a series, and that it would involve cell phones, I knew we needed to talk about it here in a Dear Television yak, the antique brass speaking-tube of television criticism formats. (We’ll follow up in a week or two with a post on the back half of the series.) There will be spoilers for episodes 1-5 so, if you’re not caught up, put on a floor-length blue silk nightgown and get watching!
#House on haunted hill netflix review tv
In other words, Jane Hu and Phil Maciak have resurrected Dear TV and are here to talk about the first half of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House. Dear TV, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.
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