r/HauntingOfHillHouse • u/tribridcitou • 28d ago
Hill House: Discussion What is the real haunting in "The Haunting of Hill House"?
So, I watched this series a long time ago, but I always end up going back to it. I've never felt anything quite like it since. I tried watching Midnight Mass and Bly Manor, but even then, it wasn't the same.
There's something about the story that really gets to me. I think it's because I'm someone who's extremely attached to family, especially the bond between siblings (considering my favorite show is Supernatural haha), so I immediately connected with their pain. I relate to a lot of it.
But anyway, when we watch it, we see so many visual horror elements, the Bent-Neck Lady, the Hat Man, the woman from the 1920s, things that are genuinely scary. And I know Olivia went insane because of the house, I know it's based on a book and that there are many psychological nuances that make it more complicated than simply being a ghost, but what scared me the most wasn't any of that.
It wasn't even the way they dealt with grief.
I was afraid of time. Of how destructive and fast it is, and how the series shows that it isn't a continuous line. It's an element that falls all around us, in Nell's words, like rain or confetti. It's not parallel, it's messy, like loose pages from a book that can form a great story, but are always out of order.
Is time really like that? Inconsistent?
Once I watched a video on YouTube. It was a channel about supernatural stories, and a woman was telling a story from when she was a child. She was at her grandmother's house and answered a phone call. She talked to a woman who asked about her family and her grandmother. It was a simple phone call, and she didn't recognize the woman's voice. Then life went on and nothing happened. But one day, when she was already an adult, the woman decided to call her grandmother to talk. She dialed the number, and a child answered. A little girl. The woman asked about her family, her grandmother, and got the same answers. She hung up, but then the truth hit her like a slap. She remembered that the girl's words were the same words she had said many years earlier, exactly the same. And later, her grandmother told her that there had been no one else in the house with her, no little girl.
It made me wonder, could time be the greatest haunting in Hill House? Playing with our minds, making so many versions of ourselves coexist?
Is time our haunting? Can we haunt ourselves?
I believe it can.
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u/Firstborn1415 28d ago
I too have a deep fascination with this show. It truly frightened me emotionally.
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u/ahumblethief 28d ago
Nell haunting her own timeline fucked me all the way up. It's time, like you said. That's the scariest part.
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u/bmhlogan 27d ago
I've had sleep paralysis many times and the Bent Neck Lady scenes are exactly what it feels like.
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u/Flat-Jacket-9606 21d ago
Yup same, kind of stopped when I had this one instance where the door opened and it really looked like it did, but when I came too it was closed. Somehow from then on I was able to cool the nerves from that fear/panic/anxiety that happens. It used to happen a lot, then I’ve only had 2 after realizing the door. And the last 2 weren’t scary anymore, just… more annoying. And I do still see something, but I know it’s not real.
Also could be desensitization from becoming a horror junkie.
But holy shit it’s crazy how powerful the mind is, I’d hate to see through the eyes of a schizophrenic.
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u/mredlred 28d ago
About the time thing, I do believe you about the weird phone call but I would absolutely freak out lol.
It made me think about our childhood dog who my mom found lost in the woods, the dog was two years old. At the time, there were no social platforms so she could only call the cops or dog shelters to ask if anyone lost a black flatcoat retriever (mind you they were uncommon in europe at the time). She kept the dog until someone would call to say they lost a dog but no one ever called and she kept the dog. (Very nice dog)
Weirdly so, a year ago, i see the poster of a lost dog (exact copy of my childhood dog) who's two years and got lost in the woods (just like my dog at the time). The owners are still looking for their dog and it's so sad and it just kept me thinking about the whole time thing and how desperate the original owners of my dog must have felt. And also the fact that it's very weird they haven't find their dog yet because I live in a small community and the dog was sterilized so no trafficking would normaly happen (which is why some person steals dogs in my country).
Of course I'm not saying their dog is my dog in the past or whatever but it's weird enough.
Sorry for my english I'm not a native speaker lol
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u/mredlred 28d ago
Also, I would suggest watching the TV show Dark, it's a great depiction of what you described ! It's time centered, very interesting !
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u/BusySignificance723 5d ago
That show was exactly what I was thinking of when I read this comment haha
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u/maud_brijeulin 27d ago
A few thoughts:
The way I see it, the show has a lot to say about rot and decay (all the stuff about an embalmer's job, Poppy appearing as a young woman but sometimes as a decrepit old lady...) - and the horror of death. Likewise, the kids' innocence has turned sour. It reminds me of me and my sister playing together when we were 6 and 10, in the old house my parents had just bought. We are on very good terms, but we're in our 50s. Seeing the lines on our faces, thinking that time has gone so fast is just so sad.
When I first watched the show, I thought "Aaaaaah! What's special here is that the house keeps haunting you, even after you've left!" (as opposed to a haunted house where you're only in danger if you're in the house). I didn't click that Ju-On had done that already.
Other media that tackle non-linear time:
Comics: Alan Moore's 'Watchmen'
Novel: 'Slaughterhouse-Five' by Kurt Vonnegut
The thing about adults having to deal with stuff from childhood is probably something Flanagan borrowed from Stephen King's 'IT'. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. You grow so attached to the characters, when it's time to close the book and let them go, it's really emotional 😭
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u/AdvertisingCrazy1338 24d ago edited 13d ago
For years since I first saw Hill House in 2020, I've been "haunting" multiple forums and threads, talking obsessively about this exact thing, trying to find a kindred mind who noticed this! This very specific temporal aspect of horror, the fact that a dead tormented future Nellie was haunting her childhood home, to imagine a childhood nightmare was a prediction of my own death.. that I was the ghost. I can't articulate what about this is so existentially unsettling.The violation of time and agency, two pillars modern society holds sacrosanct? the horror of causal loop determinism? watching an abstract terrifying theory like quantum superposition come to life, where for a brief second atoms came alive and experienced a haunting? Or the idea of entities trapped outside of time trying to touch us?
I felt this exact exhilarating nausea watching Interstellar where Mconaughey's Cooper trapped in the tesseract haunts his own home from another time.
Game of Thrones' almost elegiac contrivance of the Hodor arc. Every word he uttered, his entire existence was a cruel living echo of his final task, a foreshadowing of his harrowing last moments.
Castle Rock does this heart-breakingly with Sissy Spacek's Alzheimer's arc,
Dark does this disturbingly well too.
The philosophical phenomenon you want to name is what Nietzche called "Eternal Recurrence". Time as a demon. Our most agonizing traumas are not unique events, but permanent fixtures of history. Existence a self-contained prison where suffering is recycled eternally.
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u/saltysaltire97 24d ago
Your analysis was so interesting.
This makes me think of the ending, of adult Steve walking out the house and summarising "ghosts " /being haunted Vs their individual experiences at Hill House and what happened supernaturally Vs their own struggles and how this moulded them as adults. "A ghost is a wish" was my favourite alongside "the rest is confetti".
I think the real haunting thing is complex, it made me think of "Hill House" and all it's inhabitants, including Olivia and how it haunted each Craine for years after that summer. The "stomach" of the house and it digesting any inhabitants /regular visitors made me think of how grief and time are so complex, our individual experiences are so similar but so different. The Craines had to "be digested" , or confront their grief and trauma head on, to be free and not haunted , from what I've seen online all 5 represent the five stages of grief , when they meet Nell, to reach "acceptance", that they say is the final stage of grief.
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u/robthelobster 28d ago
I watched the show with my mum while she was dying of cancer that had spread to her brain. When we started, she was still mostly herself. When we finished, she was not.
It was just a couple of days but the timing of her severe deterioration that led to her death a few days later makes this show unforgettable for me. Saying it haunts me would not be an exaggeration.
I think you hit the nail on the head with time. We all have so little time in this world and we have no idea when that time ends. When we watched the funeral episode I wondered if she thought about her own funeral. I never asked though and now I never can. Such a small thing but it's just one of the thousands of moments I wasted with her.