The Haunting of Hill House ending allows the siblings to finally accept that they have lost their parents and that they can't change the horrible things that happened here. The Netflix series will always be one of Mike Flanagan's scariest shows because the setting is undeniably unsettling.
With Hugh gone, responsibility over the house falls to Steven, which just entails making sure nobody ever touches it. Hill House may be filled to the brim with ghouls, but a good number of those ghouls love each other. As long as Hill House still stands, those ghosts can be together forever.
"The Haunting of Hill House" is a classic example of psychological horror. It explores the fragile state of the human mind and the ways in which fear and paranoia can affect one's perception of reality. The house itself is depicted as a force that preys on the characters' psyches, leading to psychological unraveling.
The Bent-Neck Lady haunts Nell her whole life. This leads Nell to eventually go back to confront the house, in turn becoming the ghost herself and starting the entire cycle. The moment Nell set foot in Hill House her fate was sealed, she was destined to become the Bent-Neck Lady.
First off, the one we see the most is Poppy Hill, husband to William Hill, a flapper who was clinically insane and brainwashed Olivia Crain by terrifying her that her children would be eaten up by the outside world (the solution to which is, obviously, killing them and therefore keeping them safe in Hill House forever.
Who do you think put the button's on Nell's eyes in the funeral home? CG: That also is Olivia because Olivia knows how much Nell loved her buttons and it's her way of sort of making Nell at peace.
Theo has the gift of empathy that allows her to feel another person's emotions by touching them. When she touched Nell's corpse, she felt utter emptiness and it swallowed her whole. So Theo had to try to feel something again: "I reached for him because I had to feel something.
At its core, a melodrama that uses traditional horror as a metaphor for grief and generational trauma, Hill House takes Shirley Jackson's novel of the same name and electrifies its use of the haunted house trope and brings a post-modern flair to the characters.
In the miniseries version of The Haunting of Hill House, Nell's husband is a man named Arthur Vance. He is not killed by paranormal forces: Arthur Vance dies of a brain aneurism, to Nell's horror.
In the past, Theo touches her mother, Olivia, and has a premonition of Olivia's death—half of her face bloodied and disfigured, as if she has been shot in the head.
However, by piecing one and one together, it becomes apparent that the five Crain siblings actually represent the famous 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
For Theo, the Red Room is a dance studio, an important detail about Theo's character. The wooden studio floor was empty, and the little furniture that was in the room was pushed out of the way, against the walls. Theo played music and dance videos on the TV while she practiced.
What is the psychology behind The Haunting of Hill House?
The house itself really represents the mind, and the ghosts inside are the secrets of the characters — their guilt, the inability to move past the pain, confusion, and sadness from their past, and the walls of the house represent those that they build up against others in their present-day lives as a defense mechanism ...
She wears gloves to protect her from seeing too much of other people's lives through touch, which involuntarily triggers her psychic abilities. Her interactions with her family are standoffish and brutally honest, and we see how a fear of emotional intimacy defines much of her existence.
The Haunting of Hill House ending is both devastating and hopeful. Hugh takes his own life so he and Olivia can be ghosts in the house together. The final scene sees Theo, Luke, Shirley, and their partners gathering together two years in the future because Luke is sober now and doing much better.
The smiling face on the ceiling, ingrained in the wood, that peered down on her while she was being violated was the stuff of nightmares. Theo saw it when she laid on the sofa in the basement where the crimes took place. The face of Mr. Smiley would haunt Theo's dreams, too.
In the “now”, Theo holds a therapy session with a young girl, Kelsey, who claims to have been seeing a tall man she has nicknamed “Mr. Smiley”; she describes the man as always smiling but never happy.
Theo was bombarded with images when her father grabbed hold of her— a little ghostly girl on the spiral staircase, a rotting skeleton, an eerie pale face, the Red Door, and him pushing her mother forcefully. Many secrets existed, and continue to exist in the Crain family.
While Nell, Olivia, and Hugh all died at the house (thus haunting it in their afterlives), and the Dudleys also made it their final resting place, our final look at the surviving Crains seems happy: they're together, celebrating Luke's second year anniversary of his sobriety.
In Episode 9, she takes on a far more active role, and is revealed to be the overarching antagonist of the story. She is depicted as the "evil personification" of Hill House due to her clinical insanity, and nature as a restless ghost.
Deciding to spike the children's tea with poison, Olivia pours cups for Nell, Luke, and Abigail (Luke's not so imaginary friend), but only Abigail drinks it and dies. Olivia dies after throwing herself off the top of the staircase.
What is the meaning behind The Haunting of Hill House?
The hidden ghosts of Hill House aren't nameless spooks trapped between spiritual realms; they are personal manifestations for the people they haunt, visual aids for the truths they must accept and vanquish. It's not a paranormal story so much as a meditation on the distinct way grief and trauma maim the living.
The Haunting of Hill House uses the trappings of Gothic horror and familiar haunted-house tales to tell a different story entirely, one rooted deeply in metaphor: the story of a mind becoming unhinged.
What are the trigger warnings for The Haunting of Hill House?
Also, I want to put in place some trigger warnings for: suicide (it is GRAPHIC, PLEASE be careful), murder, animal abuse (not shown, but discussed), possession, death, ghosts, mental illness, funerals, vomit, overdose, alcoholism, addiction, needles, poison, bugs, thunderstorms, blood, cheating, jump scares, fighting, ...
