Around the Campus

We’ve seen director Mike Flanagan’s previous works, from Oculus to Gerald’s Game, and it’s clear with his work on Hill House that he’s becoming a top dog of the horror film industry. His intricately laced-in details that we see in Hill House, ranging all the way from the sets to the characters, are what really tie together the series not just as a beautiful story but also as a terrific example of visual flair and excellent production design.

The Haunting of Hill House tells the story of the Crain family- a family of seven, through dual (but is it really dual?) storylines of when the family moves into a gothic mansion one summer in the 1980s and of the present where the kids are grown up. Dad’s gotten old, and everything is falling apart just as it once had. We have the parents : Olivia and Hugh (yes, Elliot from E.T. has grown up.) Next come siblings Steven, Shirley, Theodora and twins Luke and Nell. The family has plans to renovate Hill House within the summer so they can sell it and use the money to build their “forever house” so they don’t have to move around again. However, Hill House itself seems to have plans (and a strange room with a red door that doesn’t have a key) that begin to overpower those of the Crains’, leaving each family member awfully scarred even twenty years later when Daddy has been estranged. Steve is making “blood” money off of his family history through dramatised novels, Shirley is a not-so-perfect homemaker and mortician, Theo is a child psychologist prone to constantly wearing gloves and pushing people away, Luke is a heroine addict and Nellie is plagued all too much by her encounters in Hill House.