The Haunting of Hill House - What you don't see won't hurt you

Introduction

The Haunting of Hill House is a hit series by Netflix that left viewers mesmerized with its effective use of the horror genre to tell the story of the real-life horrors we all face within ourselves and in our relationships. Its compelling story, coupled with the masterful cinematography, acting and attention to detail made it one of the most commented and well-reviewed series from Netflix to date.

But there’s a key element to its success that for me, personally, is generally what sticks with me from my favorite series: the characters. A good story must have good characters, for they are the gate to our experience as viewers in the world we are presented. The Haunting of Hill House characters are complex and their conflicts mirror many of the issues we all face in real life. From analyzing their behavior and development throughout the series we can take a lot of insight into our lives and stories in general.

That’s why I decided to write an article for each of the main children and post it here throughout the next weeks. Hope you are as intrigued with these writings as you were with the series itself. Just in case it’s not clear yet...

SPOILERS ALERT!!!!!!

But even if you’re one of those people who don’t mind spoilers, don’t read this article until you’ve seen the series. Seriously... go watch this masterpiece right now!

1-Steven closes his eyes

“No live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality”

The first child

That phrase opens the first episode of the series and encapsulates a contradiction between Steven’s writing and his actions. Though he affirms this in his most famous book, the one about his childhood, based on the events we see unfold throughout the series, he lives in denial of anything that shocks his state of absolute reality and pragmatism.

It became a popular theory, later confirmed by director Mike Flanagan, that each of the siblings represents one of the five stages of grief. Even though this analogy is not necessarily the focus of theses texts, incorporating it into the analysis is crucial to understand each one of the characters personalities.

Steven represents denial and the power our mind has to convince ourselves events happened in a very different way than what actually occurred. Steve’s denial comes from his rationalization of what happened in his childhood, from which he attributed his mother descent and eventual suicide to mental illness.

The way each of the siblings deals with the events of their childhood is very clear, and nothing is gratuitous here. Various scenes give us the clues to understand the workings behind the coping mechanisms of each one of them, and in Steven’s case it is all about his role as the older brother. Contrary to the youngest, Nell and Lucas, Steve doesn’t have space to fantasize or run into escapism of any sorts. Even though it’s not what’s expected from his age (pre adolescents don’t have imaginary friends, after all) he’s not allowed to be nothing less than grounded in reality.

In the opening scene he’s the one who goes to see what’s happening to his siblings until his father appears and he is also the one who’s by his father’s side during the crisis and scandal from the media after the fatal event in the house, hearing everything the lawyer has to say.

So, this grounding in reality and no-nonsense attitude made Steven a skeptic, but still within certain rules of how he was raised. Steven’s view on supernatural event’s, or better, prennatural, as he defines, is an interesting commentary on confirmation bias but also how despite our different understandings, they are still in the context of what our parents taught us.

To start understanding these connections we need to take a look at the whole incident in which Steve goes to a woman’s house hear the story about her husband’s death and possible manifestation as a ghost.

One story, two explanations

The woman’s husband died after a car accident on a rainy day pressing the car horns as a

way to ask for help. She tells Steve one night she was alone in her bed and felt water dripping on her. After that, she saw her dead husband right above her as he screamed, but instead of screams he made the sound of car horns.

After sleeping in the widow’s bedroom one night, he came up with a theory of what happened. He realized the ceiling had a drainage problem and the car horns sounds were due to a crossroad nearby from which the stop sign had been stolen. Besides, the woman’s grieving state made her more aware of all these sounds and susceptible to seeing things that weren’t there.

The explanation makes sense, but what to believe is up to the viewer. As ghosts are a real thing on the show, either of them could be true. But the thing they both have in common is that they each came with a response of what happened based on their set of beliefs. They both saw only the arguments that corroborated their world views, falling prey to confirmation bias, a common thing in the series.

Nature vs Nurture

The issue about how our parent’s beliefs are transmitted to us and stay somehow even when we start to believe new things is found in the relation of two different scenes. The first is the one in which the widow from the previous paragraph asks Steve about supernatural events, to which he replies he prefers the term prennatural: “natural phenomena that we don’t understand yet”.

The second is the scene in which Mrs. Dudley asks a Young Steve if he is familiar with the gospels, to which his mother replies that yes, and he’s also familiar with a number of other religions. As justification to this she quotes Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

These two scenes allow us to understand that even if Steve is a skeptic, he is still open to things he may not know yet, under the condition that it is within the boundaries of what he considers rational. This openness is related to his mother’s belief in supernatural events which is in stark contrast to his father initially more grounded approach.

Each parent is as representation of Steve’s different sides, conscious and subconscious, fighting for space in his belief system. Steve’s denial comes metaphorically from the scene of their final moments in the house. Hugh comes to rescue a young Steve and during their escape he says this to his son:

“You keep your eyes closed no matter what you hear. You don’t open them”

Steven goes on to promise his dad he would keep his eyes shut, a moment we can understand as a metaphor for Steve closing his eyes for any possibility outside of the rational. This can also be interpreted as a demonstration of how the things our parents tell us and how we absorb it as children affect our lives as adults and create unconscious tensions that mold our beliefs and behavior.

I want to believe

The core conflict of Steve can be seen as his repression of a part of himself that wanted to find answers but couldn’t, so retreated into disbelief. During his conversations with the widow there are two statements he gives that shed light into this relationship between wanting to believing and not believing.

The first:

“All those years trying to understand what happened in that house, you know what I never found? A reason. So, don’t expect one.”

The second:

“I’ve seen a lot of ghosts. Just not the way you think. A ghost can be a lot of things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Grief, anger, guilt. But in my experience...most times, they’re just what we want to see. Most times a ghost is a wish.”

The first statement addresses his wish to find a reason for everything that happened. It’s part of the human nature to try and find the meaning of things, build a whole narrative to corroborate an idea. But when we are not able to do this, especially with traumatic events, all that we are left with is the emptiness of what we’ve been through and the feeling it was all in vain.

This need to create meaning and a narrative manifest in Steve’s career as a writer, his job is essentially to create a story, and justify the events that occur for the satisfaction of the readers and in a way his own catharsis.

The second statement defines a ghost as many human feelings, but mainly as a wish. His unconfronted wish of finding a real and satisfactory reason for everything that happened to his family, manifests as the ghost of his sister he is now seeing.

These goes to show that no matter how much we live in denial and repress that which we don’t want to confront, sooner or later our repressed feelings come to the surface and form a reality we can no longer escape. Steve closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see what scared him, but now his eyes have been opened and he can’t ignore the ghosts.