The ending of Mike Flanagan's series adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix is a ghost-laden doozy. From the very beginning, the Crain family is at odds with their respective inner demons, the literal and figurative skeletons in their closets, and their damaged memories. But it's the house they all grew up in - the infamous Hill House - that has rendered the worst damage.
In The Haunting on Hill House, husband and wife Hugh and Olivia Crain (played by Henry Thomas and Carla Cugino, respectively) temporarily move with their five children to Hill House for the summer. Their plan is to restore the massive home to its former glory, flip it, and finally have a shot at building their forever home from scratch. Little do they realize, however, that Hill House isn't just haunted, but infested with evil. Not only are there ghosts lurking in nearly every corner of the house, but Hill House is itself a living thing; and, like all living things, it needs to feed. Unfortunately for the Crain family, despite their hopeful ambitions, Hill House feeds on the people living inside of it.
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The series teeters back and forth in time, shedding light on the family's horrific experience living inside Hill House, while also visiting them as adults, reeling off the damage the house has done to them over the years. And, already torn apart from tragedy, the family is faced with even more horrors as Hill House does its best to lure them back and finish what it started years earlier.
- This Page: The Red Room and Nell's Death
- Page 2: The Abigail Twist, and A Happy Ending
The Red Room Twist Explained
The scattered timeline in The Haunting of Hill House can be disorienting, but the story itself is fairly simple. At its core, it's about a monster. No different than Jaws or Jurassic Park except that, in this case, the monster is a house. And, despite the fact that it's completely immobile, Hill House is stronger than it looks and more powerful than it seems, playing to its manipulative strengths as a kind of Venus flytrap where the fly doesn't realize it's already being eaten.
The Crain family is trapped in Hill House the moment they step through its doors. They see the occasional ghost and hear the occasional whisper in the shadows, but little do they know that Hill House has had them hooked from the beginning. And, by the end of the series, the surviving members of the Crain family finally discover the truth behind (or, in this case, within) the house. Olivia Crain touches on the fact that all houses are like bodies ("the walls are bones, pipes are veins," etc.), and this leads to the assumption that the mysterious Red Room within Hill House must be the heart. Only, this isn't the case. As the first season comes to a close, the Crain family discovers that the Red Room is actually the stomach of Hill House, and ever since the family had been living there, it had been digesting them one by one.
Here's the big twist: the family discovers that Hill House had tricked them into entering the Red Room by changing on the inside, giving it a unique appearance and location to each member of the family (for Luke, it was a treehouse; for Olivia, it was a reading room, etc.). The house tricks people into staying inside of it and, though most of the family managed to just barely avoid being devoured completely, Olivia, Nell (played by Victoria Pedretti), and Hugh (played by Timothy Hutton in the modern setting) weren't so lucky.
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What Happened to Nell?
Speaking of Nell, her storyline is the catalyst of the action in The Haunting of Hill House. From the very beginning, she's being pulled back to Hill House more forcefully than any of her siblings, haunted by visions of the ghost she used to see when she was a child (a woman she dubbed "the bent-neck lady"). She's tempted back to Hill House out of sheer curiosity to better understand the house's intentions, but she's ultimately drawn in when the house makes her believe that her late-husband Arthur (played by Jordane Christie) is still alive. It offers her the happy ending and reprieve she's been desperate for her entire life.
It's not really a happy ending, though - just a trap. The house ultimately kills Nell, trapping her soul inside of it forever, and in doing so she's lost in Hill House's supernatural reality. Once she's tricked into placing a noose around her own neck, and is then pushed to her death, it's revealed that Nell is the bent-neck lady, meaning she's been haunting herself all this time in the show's own Doctor Who-esque timey-wimey way.
What Hill House didn't prepare for was the fact that the Crain family has their own supernatural abilities. Theodora (played by Kate Siegel) is a psychic empath, Luke and Nell share a psychic twin link with each other, and Olivia had her own share of unusual abilities ever since she was a child. And while this might have made some of them especially sensitive to Hill House's pull, it also helped level the competition once Hill House consumed them. They weren't just lifeless morsels in the belly of a monster - they had some legitimate fighting power. This resulted in Nell moving through time and space, within and outside of the house, in order to warn herself and the other members of her family of Hill House's overall agenda.
Page 2: The Abigail Twist, and A Happy Ending
The Abigail Twist Explained
In The Haunting of Hill House, ghosts are around every corner. Whether ill-intentioned or indifferent, they roam the grounds and clearly have no problem making themselves known. That said, there's a clever reveal at the end of the show that plays with the audience's concept of reality - which is especially fitting, considering Hill House's entire M.O. For anyone not paying close enough attention, though, it might be slightly confusing upon first viewing.
When Luke is a child (played by Julian Hilliard), he draws some decidedly spooky pictures, suggesting that he's seen his fair share of ghosts. The standout "ghost" he's been spotting around the grounds, watching him and waving to him from the woods, is a young girl named Abigail (played by Olive Elise Abercrombie). Only, it turns out that Abigail isn't a ghost at all, but the daughter of Hill House's caretakers, Mr. and Mrs. Dudley (played by Robert Longstreet and Annabeth Gish). She's home-schooled, an only child, and strictly forbidden by her parents from ever stepping foot into Hill House. As it so happens, given that Luke has befriended her during his summer-long stay at Hill House, she ends up spending the night, and is unfortunately added onto Hill House's menu.
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Since Hill House has led Olivia to believe that killing Luke and Nell will wake them up from some supposed dream, thus saving them from dying tragic deaths years later, she invites them both - along with Abigail - to a tea party in the Red Room. The tea is laced with rat poison, and before her own children ever put their lips to their cups, Abigail is horrifically killed. To no one's surprise, Abigail's ghost is immediately trapped inside Hill House, and once her parents discover what's happened, they succeed in convincing Hugh to salvage the house and keep it standing, despite his better judgment.
The reasoning behind their desperation is to give themselves a chance to continue visiting the house in order to see Abigail. It's another devilish form of manipulation crafted from Hill House, using Hugh's innate empathy and sympathy to its advantage. His guilt over Abigail's death, combined with his sympathy for the Dudleys (which is considerable, given the fact that the couple had already lost their first child years earlier), keeps the house alive. And, though so many characters who interact with Hill House want nothing more than to stay away, it makes any opportunity to escape impossible.
A Happy Ending... for Hill House
Hill House is kind of like the irresistible force paradox - only, in this case, Hill House is the immovable object and the unstoppable force. The origin of its evil isn't entirely clear (the Hills, its original owners, were insane, but that's more a case of adding fuel to the fire than being the cause of the fire), but that's what makes Hill House that much more threatening. It doesn't have a motive, it has an appetite. Maybe it's built on this universe's version of the Hellmouth, and maybe it's no different than any other catastrophic anomaly in nature, only with walls and a roof.
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By the end of The Haunting of Hill House, the anomalies run deep. So deep, in fact, that the same manipulation it spread over the Crains and the Dudleys and every other poor soul that walked its halls is spread over you, the audience. There's an artificial gloss unfurled over the ending, despite all the horrors that transpired. The folksy "If I Go, I'm Goin'" by Gregory Alan Isakov plays over the final few moments of the last episode, and there's finally a break in the terror. Only, there isn't. Hill House has simply - and yet again - used manipulation to hide the damage it's done, and will continue doing.
Sure, the remaining Crain siblings made it out of Hill House alive, but it came with some significant costs. The house has already successfully consumed Olivia and Nell, and it managed to trick Hugh into its belly just the same, and yet the audience is supposed to believe that the others are out of harm's way? These are characters who have already started digesting in Hill House, and it's not in the nature of a beast to turn down fresh meat. This is the house that not only killed a young girl (Abigail), but tricked her parents inside as well, as though they'd live out some happily ever after as a family for eternity (they won't).
No, the house feeds; and to feed, it tricks. No matter how uplifting the ending of the show's first season might have seemed, reprieves are far from anything Hill House is willing to hand out. Sooner or later, Hill House will go back on whatever "promises" it's made, and it'll do so happily, unforgivingly, and viciously.
The first season of The Haunting of Hill House is currently streaming on Netflix.