The first time I watched The Haunting of Hill House (2018), I was entirely consumed by a desire to figure out what, exactly, had happened to the Crain family.
The mounting unease onscreen permeated my watching experience. I was very much spooked by the ghosts, the Bent-Neck Lady, the mysterious man with the bowler hat and, of course, Poppy. As a first-time viewer, I was an outsider. I didn’t know what the characters knew and I grew frustrated with their apathy and inaction in the face of growing evidence that something was very much not right, and, quite frankly, I wanted to punch Steven in the face.
My most recent viewing was entirely different. I knew the plot twists, the jump scares, the heartbreaking emotional beats. Rather than focus on piecing together all of the clues, I now found myself fixated on who the Crains were as people, as a broken family wrenched apart by a series of traumatic moments, their pain never fully recognized or healed.
This time around, all I could think about was Steven’s comment: “Why does this family have such a hard time acknowledging mental illness?”
His pained frustration reverberated in my head. I was no longer invested primarily in the ghost story. Instead, I started to think about the ways in which this show is not simply about literal ghouls, but also about the fractures that mental illness can cause within a family. Suddenly, I felt like I knew, intrinsically, who the Crains were as people. My personal experiences do not neatly align with theirs, nor do the members of my own family fit easily into these archetypes. But mental illness has very much worked its way through my family tree, a generational disease that has left a heavy mark. Denial, too, has sometimes sprouted up in the cracks. And, while watching this series, I suddenly understood each and every one of them.
On the show, Nell’s ghosts are not figurative, but literal. It is both terrifying and, as a viewer, easier to understand. Her traumas are physical manifestations, something the audience can see. When her siblings dismiss her fears, we sympathize with her and we feel indignant on her behalf.
She’s not lying. She’s not crazy.
But what if the ghosts had stayed in her mind? What if we had never been able to witness the terrifying, distorted figure of the Bent-Neck Lady? Would our sympathy arise as easily? Would we so quickly believe Nell?
In a sense, Nell’s struggles have a solution—it is difficult to parse the solution, which is tangled up in the tragedies of Hill House, but there is one. The Crain family must, somehow, confront the evil of their old home. They have to slay the dragon. These are truths we come to know and accept. Yet, like the reality of grappling with mental illness, fighting “evil” can be intangible, vague, and hard-to-see. If we read Nell’s personal demons as a larger metaphor for an undisclosed mental illness, we can also witness the heartbreak of the solution arriving “too late.” Nell loses her life in this fight. Her ghosts kill her. The show makes sure our hearts break for Nell.
This narrative sympathy is a clever storytelling maneuver.
In real life, it is often much harder for people to so easily align themselves with someone who is struggling with mental illness. In real life, it is easier to step away and pretend that it is not happening. In real life, a lot of viewers would be like Nell’s siblings. That is not a form of castigation, just a reality check.
But what, exactly, does it mean to be “crazy”? Nell’s sisters and brothers toss the word off cavalierly, which allows us to readily pass judgment at their cruelty.
But it’s much more complicated than that.
We only see two versions of the Crain family: we get to know them as children and then, suddenly, as full-grown adults. The father notes that twenty years have passed. In two decades, new memories, broken promises, heartaches, and arguments have occurred off-screen. Characters reference past events offhandedly, or angrily, in the heat of an argument. We are told things, but we don’t get to experience them. This is significant. It makes it harder for us to sympathize with the coldness that the older Crains, Steven, Shirley, and Theo, exhibit toward Nell. They come across as callous, indifferent. And they are. This is not to excuse the ways in which they turn their backs on Nell, particularly when she is so clearly crying for help.
But they do love her.
It’s just that their own pain obscures their personal ability to reach out. While Nell is more obviously spiraling, they are also struggling in quieter ways. None of them are at a stable juncture where they can offer a guiding hand. Perhaps they seem indifferent. But they aren’t.
During both viewings, I gravitated toward Theo. As a kid, she was an introverted bookworm, quiet and curious. On the show, her power of touch allows her to absorb the feelings of both people and objects. Like Nell’s ghosts, Theo’s “power” is a real thing. But it easily translates to a real-world equivalent.
While I could not literally soak up the emotions of others, I was incredibly sensitive to their feelings and thoughts. I was an anxious people-pleaser, someone who obsessively read and responded to the subtle fluctuations in facial expressions. I often tamped down what I wanted in order to make others feel better. I too often tried to guess what friends and family were thinking, rather than ask them. I felt like it was my job to make sure everyone else was happy. In my head, I was more comfortable making myself uncomfortable rather than making anyone else feel that way. My “power” wasn’t real, but, like Theo’s ability, it was incredibly draining and time-consuming.
When Theo starts wearing gloves, it is a physical form of self-preservation; it symbolizes the first step she takes to protect herself, to prioritize her own thoughts and feelings. As an adult, Theo is a psychologist. She knows, now, how to establish boundaries for her own sake.
When she visits Nell, they argue. Theo displays frustration at Nell’s therapist, noting that he hasn’t seemed to help Nell healthily deal with the loss of her husband.
She is also exasperated with Nell, pointing at the mess in her bedroom, and says, “I just wanted to visit my sister and go to the beach and get drinks and cry.”
This scene takes place in Episode 5, an episode devoted entirely to Nell’s backstory and perspective. As a result, like Nell, it is easy to think that Theo is being unnecessarily harsh and insensitive. Can’t she see that Nell is struggling? Can’t she see that Nell is grieving? But if we take a look at Theo’s perspective, her reaction is understandable. Theo is craving normalcy. She is craving sisterly bonding. She wants Nell to be the Nell she used to know.
That isn’t entirely fair, as Nell has her own demons to contend with and can’t simply revert back to a simpler version of herself to make her sister happy.
At the same time, we haven’t seen all of the moments where her siblings tried to help her. They allude to these moments, but we only get murky outlines, never seeing their shape. Theo’s frustration is borne out of years of stagnation. She can see Nell’s pain and it triggers her own pain. When she leaves, she is trying to set a boundary. She is trying not to subsume her own stability for someone else. She is trying not to fall into her own black hole.
Whereas Theo can be angrier and blunter, the oldest sister, Shirley, strives for reliability and control. She is meticulous in her work, a perfectionist. She does not like things to be out of order. Like Steven, she often calls out the family’s history of mental illness. When Nell talks about the Bent-Neck Lady or her father discusses ghosts, she becomes impatient. She does not want their disease mythologized. She wants it named, clearly, for what it is. Shirley desires order and stability. She flinches from the chaos of her family because she remembers the ways that chaos ruined them so long ago. In response, she tries to create for herself a world that is understandable, all clean lines and soft spaces. When that is threatened, she grows defensive.
Aside from Nell, the other sibling who repeatedly encroaches upon Shirley’s attempts at control is Luke.
With him, the show follows a tactic similar to the one that it employs for Nell. Like Nell, his hauntings are real, not imaginary. He seeks out drugs not only to numb his emotional pain, but to numb his ability to see ghosts. As viewers, we see how terrifying it is when the ominous man with the bowler hat follows Luke on the streets of Boston. He is not “making things up.” When his siblings look at him with disappointment, suspicion, and resignation, we want to shake them. Luke says, “You don’t believe me?” And we want to yell at his brothers and sisters—Believe him! It’s all true!
But real life is harder.
Unlike Nell, where we never see for ourselves how her siblings tried to help her—we only see them dismiss, repeatedly, the idea of the Bent-Neck Lady, further isolating Nell and driving us even closer to her side—we do see a time when they try to help Luke. In a flashback, Shirley pays an exorbitant fee for Luke’s stay at a rehabilitation center. This is a savvy storytelling plot point because it undercuts an easy alliance with Luke by complicating it, drawing out the contradictions of familial love in the face of emotional upheaval and betrayal. When Luke runs away from the facility, we know how devastating it is for Shirley. She put her own livelihood on the line to ensure his recovery—and it was all for nothing.
When Shirley tells Luke that he cannot come to Nell’s wedding, it is heartbreaking. He wants to be there for his twin sister. But, as hard as it is, Shirley is right. Like Theo, she is setting a boundary.
“This is Nell’s day,” she says.
Shirley can tell that Luke is high on drugs. She does not want her little sister’s wedding usurped by Luke. She wants Nell’s day to be perfect. Again and again, she tried to help Luke, but he rejected it. Of course, even that is a simplification. Addiction is a grueling disease. It is not something easy to be overcome. And we can see that Luke’s heart breaks when he realizes that Shirley is right. The show navigates these scenes with a nuanced hand, pulling sympathies from one end to another. In a way, each sibling is right—even when it seems like they are wrong.
Here, too, we finally witness Shirley’s protective big sister side. Here, we witness her love for Nell, her desire to make sure that her little sister only experiences happiness and ease on her wedding day. It is a humanizing moment for Shirley. Nell’s wedding is a critical touchstone in the show. It not only humanizes each sibling, but it also demonstrates why, exactly, they all harbor so much pain and frustration.
We see their love.
Steven and Nell share a brother-sister dance, laughing and smiling after accidentally catching Theo in a tryst upstairs. Shirley and Theo are bridesmaids, clapping in support as Nell reaches the dance floor. We see Nell’s complete contentment in the arms of her loving husband. It is a rare moment of bliss. And we come to understand that their present-day pain is a longing for what once was and what could have been if only they had confronted their ghosts.
And now, this all leads us to the eldest sibling, Steven.
The first time I watched Hill House, I truly couldn’t stand Steven. His pretentious demeanor, his disdain for his family, his lack of empathy—it frustrated me to no end.
But now, I get him. He’s not likable, but his actions are far from one-dimensional or completely opaque.
As the oldest sibling, Steven has the strongest memories of a time when his family was perfectly fine. Not just fine, but thriving. He remembers a father who could “fix anything” and he remembers a mother who was warm, confident, and funny. He remembers, keenly, a time before the fall. And that becomes a breeding ground for his resentments. As an adult, Steven has no patience for his family’s shortcomings.
He angrily tells his father, “Our family has a disease that’s never been treated.”
During a tense car ride, he accuses his dad of turning a blind eye to his mother’s mental health struggles, of abandoning her when she most needed him, and of catalyzing what he believes is his mom’s suicide. When he looks back on an unsettling interaction he had with his mother at Hill House, a disarming moment where she punches the mirror of a dresser he specifically renovated for her as a gift, he says, “Mom was going through a manic episode.”
In more than one scene, Steven repeats the same sentiment, “Mom was mentally ill.”
He says it over and over again. In the context of the show, which is about horror and hauntings, it reads as obliviousness or purposeful denial. We want to roll our eyes. They’re ghosts.
But, again, reality is not so obvious.
In a world where ghosts translate into unprocessed trauma, Steven’s bitterness makes total sense. To him, his family’s denial has allowed mental illness to fester, unchecked, and ravage the minds of everyone he loves. It is scary to watch someone you love disappear right in front of you. He specifically says “mental illness” over and over again because he needs it verbalized.
The majority of his family refuses to acknowledge it.
So he tries to acknowledge it for all of them. He says it like he hopes it will break the spell and make them realize the truth of their pain. If only they could say it out loud, say mental illness, then perhaps they could all seek help. Perhaps they could finally talk about what actually happened to their mom, what is actually happening to Nell and Luke, and they would no longer drive themselves aimlessly in circles, repeating the same terrible mistakes over and over again.
In this sense, Steven’s decision to write a book about Hill House and what happened to his family within its walls—a choice reviled by his siblings as an exploitative money-making scheme—also makes sense. Steven wants to write it down so that others will see that it is true. So that someone, anyone, out there will validate his reality. His family won’t do that. So he seeks external validation. It also allows him to process his experiences and, perhaps, keep those painful memories at a distance.
In Suzanne Buffam’s “Enough,” she writes, “The more words a person knows to describe her private sufferings, the more distantly she can perceive them.”
Steven is trying to take the trauma out of the traumatic event by talking about it. If it’s not hidden in the shadows, like his father tries so desperately to do with his mother’s death, then perhaps it can no longer hurt him.
Aside from the ghosts, there are no villains in The Haunting of Hill House. There are only people. Flawed, hurt, confused people trying to put the pieces of their family back together.
As Hill House shows, that is far from easy work.
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