...well, that was certainly an unexpected ending.
So, I watched Netflix's adaptation (for lack of a better term) of The Haunting of Hill House back in October/November. Enjoyed it a lot, thought some of the directing decisions were brilliant, but also knew pretty quickly that it was going way off-script. Years and years ago I remember having seen the 1990s film version, and thinking it was... less than great... but not really having a way of articulating why. However, it was pretty clearly a haunted house movie. The Netflix version spends very little time with the adult characters in the titular house, which is a big change from the previous plot. Now, though, having read the book, I think I can explain what's so wrong with the 1999 version, and the trailer I linked there does a very good job of spelling it out exactly.
"There once was a house. A bright happy home. Something bad happened. Now it sits all alone."
Yeaaaaaah, no. Hill House is not at all supposed to be a happy home. Or have a villainous scientist doctor going on, or crazy Winchester House-like bricked-up doors, or... any of the weird stuff that you see in that trailer. But then, that's what you get with a 1990s action film director doing a haunted house thriller, right?
Let's instead look at what Shirley Jackson had to say about the house, hmm? A passage that she not only starts the book with, but also ends with.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
That does not sound like a bright happy home, to me. And indeed, the house seems, by the descriptions given in the book, to have been purposefully designed to be unsettling to those inhabiting it.
The first thing that's really worth noting, though, is that at no time do we actually see a ghost in the text of the book. Suspenseful scares, sure, but never anything visible. Instead, it's a series of ways that the house is just subtly deranged. Now, that may be anthropomorphizing, to suggest that the house itself suffers some mental instability, but... well, Mrs. Jackson helpfully established that in the second sentence of the book, and the house itself is almost as much a character as any of the leads.
Our primary protagonist in the book, and presumably the 1960s film version (the only one of the three adaptations I haven't yet seen; I wanted to read the book first, as it's apparently also the only one of the three that actually follows the book at all), is Eleanor Vance. Those who have seen the Netflix version may know Eleanor, Nell, as the youngest of the Crain children, who was the most affected by the strangeness of the house, and who spends most of the series, well... dead. Other than the first two chapters (about six pages which serve to give some general background for the characters as a whole, and set up why they all find themselves together in Hill House) and the last chapter (half a page giving a very trim epilogue of 'Here's what happened after all that just went down,' we spend the entire book in Eleanor's head. Very much so, in fact; every little flight of fancy that her mind wanders down is spelled out for us. She lives a very active fantasy life, perhaps understandable as she has spent her entire adult life, up until three months prior to the events of the novel, taking care of her invalid mother, who was apparently equal parts needy and abusive; she now lives on a cot at her sister's house, generally aimless, unemployed, and seemingly still subject to a certain amount of verbal abuse.
Eleanor is joined in our insane manor by Theodora (just Theodora), an artist with a generally lackadaisical view of cultural norms or even generally planning ahead; Luke Sanderson, a character somewhat in the vein of Shakespeare's Prince Hal in that he's got all the advantages being in a rich family brings, but somehow manages to be a bit of a roguish sort nonetheless, and who stands to eventually inherit Hill House; and the three have been brought together by the invitation of Dr. John Montague, a psychologist by training who is trying to bring some scientific credibility to the study of the supernatural, primarily through a method of 'Get some people who have been even tentatively associated in the past with some kind of paranormal occurrence into the house, and have everyone take notes while we stay here for the summer.'
Note: Luke is there because the family that owns Hill House wants a member of the family there; Theo is apparently clairvoyant or something but it's never actually something that plays into the narrative; and Eleanor's house was apparently bombarded with rocks for three days when she was a child, for no apparent reason, though she believes it to have been a prank perpetrated by the neighbors.
Eleanor is a likeable character, though shows signs early on of having a rather less than firm grasp on right and wrong, or even adult life. In order to participate in Dr. Montague's research, she has to steal her sister's car (telling herself that it's OK because "it's half hers," but also not bothering to actually tell anyone where she's going), and consistently lies to everyone she meets once she's started her drive down the road about who she is and what she has waiting for her back at home. It's only in the final pages of the book that anyone finds out the truth about her life, and by then... well, the house has done its damage.
It's very well established from the early pages that, in the small nearby community of Hillsdale, everyone knows precisely what the house is, and knows to stay away from it. We only see the little community long enough for Eleanor to stop in, buy a cup of coffee, and have a very brief exchange asking about how often they get visitors (never). The groundskeeper at the gate to the house is surly, wary of letting anyone in, and once she talks her way past the gate and gets up the driveway, her first impression of the house itself is, well...
The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.
If only she had listened... well, then the novel wouldn't have happened at all, but such is the way of things; many horror and suspense novels wouldn't happen if the characters listened to their gut.
What we come to find out is that the house was designed by Hugh Crain as a sort of... experiment, almost, in making things purposefully unsettling. There are no right angles in the house; everything is off by just fractions of a degree, perhaps one or two at most. The end result ends up being that doors like to shut themselves if not propped open, rooms feel just a little bit off, and it's easy to think that the house is differently shaped than it actually is by looking out a window. This isn't helped by a floor layout in which there are a great many rooms with no windows to the outside, halls that seem to go just a little too far, a kitchen with three doors out onto the veranda... But not any secret passages or completely hidden rooms, we're assured.
The house is relatively benign by day. Mrs. Dudley, who takes care of the house and cooks for the guests, is very curt, not talkative at all, and very open about how she does not stay there after dark, under any circumstances. In fact, it's stated early on that leaving the house at night is a poor idea; there's a history of people not actually making it down the driveway if they attempt it.
The first part of the novel, then, is taken up with the characters getting to know each other, exploring the house, and Eleanor forming a close friendship with Theo. This becomes a sort of safety mechanism for Eleanor, particularly after the strange events begin at night. Banging on doors, doorknobs jiggling, and so on, with sounds coming from too high up on the door for any of the people present to make them. You know, haunted house stuff.
This starts to change, however, after the house starts directly going after Eleanor. Or maybe not. It's hard to say what's really going on. The first directed occurence is a chalked message along the length of an entire hallway, HELP ELEANOR COME HOME. Whispered voices, seemingly only heard by Eleanor. A scene where Theo's room is vandalized with what seems to all those present to have been blood, the message HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR on the wall in the red paint-that-isn't-paint. This particular incident is perhaps the most perplexing in the novel; all four of the primary cast see the way the room has been left, and the room is locked up afterward, to preserve the evidence for Dr. Montague to later sketch for the book he plans to write about all this, but later, when it's opened up again by Dr. Montague's wife, who shows up in the last part of the novel to "helpfully" offer her skills as a medium, everything has been returned to the way it was, as if nothing had happened.
The vandalism in Theo's room drives a wedge between the two women, and Eleanor spends the second half of the book gradually becoming more and more paranoid, convinced that everyone is talking about her when she's not around, that they all know she's a fraud, that none of them are actually her friends at all. This builds to a point where she has a complete psychotic break, in a scene that was very much channeled in the Netflix series during Nell's return to the house, though with a very different endpoint.
The biggest thing that stands out in the novel, really, is that most of the events could, theoretically, be explained on a purely scientific basis. The chalk message could be Luke pranking everyone (though he denies it). The banging on doors could be the house settling. The shadows and unsettling feeling, well, that's explained by the unsettling architecture of the house itself. Eleanor becoming convinced that she belongs in Hill House, that it's her home now and she won't leave, she's going to stay here forever... she's got a less than coherent grasp of reality, as it were.
Theo's room, though, remains the biggest question. What really happened there, and how did it get returned to the way it was? The characters establish early on a rule that nobody should go anywhere alone, and indeed, until Eleanor's breakdown, nobody goes anywhere on their own.
All the same, there is never any indication that there's a real ghost in Hill House. Mrs. Montague may argue that her planchette told her there's a nun bricked up in the walls, or a defrocked monk, but nobody pays her claims any credence. Rather, the implication given by the text is that it is the house itself that is doing the haunting. A mass hallucination seems somewhat unlikely, given the detail of the episode in Theo's room, but seems the only other potential explanation, short of the house being, well...
not sane.
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