HOW THE NEW HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE FAILED ME

I didn't want a new version. Advance word was that it was a complete retooling. So, why still give it that title? Advance word was good so I gave it a go. What I found was that it's an interesting take but it doesn't resolve its own tension. I'll get to what I mean by that but for now I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't like horror who might see some of its lesser sung possibilities.

I'll start with what I liked. When I watch a horror story new to me I start looking for the metaphor. All good horror runs on metaphor and is happy for everyone to know that. Poor horror keeps that down and stitches scares together. I should note that by "poor" I do not mean low budget. The overwhelming majority of poor horror movies I've seen over the last twenty-plus years have been the production of major studios with big budgets. They're poor because they leave the metaphor flat and fill the screen with production and have bloated running times. The descent of illconceived ambition that plagues the students in the Blair Witch Project got to the screen with a lot of maxed credit cards and a canny way with the young popular internet. It remains great horror.

So, is The Haunting of Hill House great? It's metaphor is served with depth and grace and it is sustained. The straining dysfunction of a family that has known trauma didn't need a haunted house but it was a bold choice to reimagine an American classic with an insistence on that. The stories of individual characters and the growing complexity in the series can be impressive. but there's a problem. It has to do with look and feel.

Hill House (which is what I'm going to call it) runs on two basic aesthetic schemes. The present day timeline is given a sombre pallet. Jade greens, greys, pallor on the faces of the Caucasian characters, a kind of constant rainy day sadness. The world of childhood and the House is made from a kind of Disney gothic, rich colour pallet but desaturated, cobwebbed, dark and endless. This is where almost all the ghosts appear and there is a legion of them (including all the "hidden" ones). At one point a character walks down a hallway in the present and enters the House and the change is done by him going through a door. Otherwise, for most of the series, the two timelines are separate and distinguished by these aesthetics.

This is understandable but it means that the cold realist drama of the present day needs an extra strong reach to keep the viewer in touch with the wildly supernatural world of the past. What you get is jump scares, heavy makeup and truckloads of digital effects that look the same as the ones used in forgettable blather like Mama, The Woman in Black (2012) or Darkness or the clueless remakes of J-Horror from the 2000s. This is meant to inform the behaviour of the grown up children in the present day timeline. It just looks like they lived in a carnival ghost house.

All the spectres (with a very few notable exceptions) have the dessicated skin and boiled eyes of all the ooky spooky ghosts of those crap movies I mentioned above. I was enticed by reports of scares that the cast themselves found too scary or some audience members vomiting from them. Really? Have these people never seen a mainstream horror film from the past two decades? If they have ghosts they ALL look like that and emerge suddenly with giant orchestral stabs. There is just no fear left in me for this kind of presentation. It might as well be the Thriller video. There are, as noted, exceptions to this and their effectiveness completely eclipses the main ones and renders them goofy and try-hard. I do not believe anyone would emerge traumatised from such a derivative supernature (I know, the trauma is primarily from something else but the line was too good not to use).

What this does is highlight how laboured the rest of it is. The present day drama is plodding and overstretched. Even when it picks up and offers characters that aren't a trial to try and care for (i.e. the twins) you get the feeling that one rather than two hours might have done a fresher feeling job. The celebrated episode 6 done in an effectively faked single take (nothing wrong with that: it's been good enough for Hitchcock and Gaspar Noe in their time) begins compellingly but soon feels exhausting and strained (not intentionally). Some of the dialogue and a great deal of the performances in the series are superb but both are let down by an apparent mistaking of screen time for depth.

Shirley Jackson's novel puts an uneasily assembly of ghost hunters into a situation that grows increasingly menacing. There is no resolution of the reality of the ghosts and while there are manifestations nary a one is seen. It is a psychological horror and when the least stable character emerges as the one with the greatest affinity with the big threatening place and feels progressively at home there you feel a downpour of her history and the heartrending sense of fate she feels it gives her as the worst happens. The Robert Wise film from 1963 honours this. Even if it leaves much of the novel out it stays true to it and offers a single realm to which we offer without effort our suspension of disbelief. The Netflix outing makes hard work of the imagination (around the cliched effects) and then tries our patience with unlikeable characters. And then it betrays everyone who has read and loved the book and seen and loved the 1963 film with a goofy nice ending. There are no rich horror fiction metaphors here or if there are they have collapsed under all that positive thinking. Not one for me.