
Dudley's ( Robert Longstreet) mother started acting "scattered" while working in the house, going out into the woods at night and giggling like a school girl. The Dudleys have experience with the messed up happenings of Hill House. Dudley come with the house," a young Steven tells Clara Dudley ( Annabeth Gish)-who live through the woods on the outskirts of town. But the real answer is way more tragic than that Abigail is the daughter of the Dudleys, Hill House's maintenance staff-"Dad says you and Mr. The show paints the mysterious Abigail as Luke's imaginary friend (or ghost), just another delusion conjured up by Hill House. Olivia did manage to poison one child on her way out the (red) door, Abigail, who it turns out by season's end is very real. Hugh stops her, smuggling his kids to safety and kickstarting the modern day storyline of Hill House, and Olivia kills herself in the house, hoping to finally wake up. The night that The Haunting of Hill House returns constantly to in flashback, hints, and red herrings is the night Olivia poured rat poison into teacups and tried to take her children with her to whatever loopy other-side she already existed in.
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The series weaves the idea that the Craines are striving for their dream home, their forever home, which is twisted with the reveal that to die inside Hill House is to literally make it your forever home. By the time Olivia has gone fully off the deep the house has convinced her that murdering her entire family is the helpful thing, the only way to wake them from this awful twisted dream they're all having at once. But the show heartbreakingly sets this up as an extension of Olivia's genuine love as a mother. Summed up, the house convinced Olivia that her family needed to die. The entire Crain family felt the effects of Hill House, but no one more so than matriarch Olivia Crain, who was extra susceptible because of her repressed psychic gifts. Nell Crain describes her permanent residence best herself in the finale: "I’m like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside."

Like the scariest creatures, the house is just hungry. Really, the house isn't so different from other iconic horror monsters it's a zombie devouring brains, a vampire sucking blood, a shark chomping guts. The house convinces you to take part willingly, persuading the living that reality is a dream and the only way back to waking life is through death. They're like fuel for a fucked up machine. Ultimately, that seems to be the house's goal, to trap as many wayward souls within itself as possible, feeding off whatever misery was within them in their final moments. It got most of the Hill family, most grotesquely William Hill, who bricked himself behind a wall in the basement in 1948. Anyone who walks through the front door is susceptible to one hell of a paranormal mind-trip-hallucinations, delusions, lost hours, momentary jumps through both space and time-and if you die there, you belong to the house for good, as evidenced by the many wonderfully terrifying souls that pop up, often literally, throughout the series. It's the archetypal haunted house because it just is. One of the best-and most horrifying-aspects of The Haunting of Hill House is the lack of a concrete explanation for how the evil inside this place came to be.

RELATED: Mike Flanagan's Netflix Shows Ranked From 'Midnight' to 'Manor' Namely, the Crain siblings, a much more fucked up version of Arrested Development's Bluths with horrific trauma replacing witty banter: horror author Steven ( Michiel Huisman), mortician Shirley ( Elizabeth Reaser), semi-psychic psychologist Theodora ( Kate Siegel), addict Luke ( Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and his twin sister Nell ( Victoria Pedretti), who takes her own life inside the walls of Hill House.īelow, I'm going to try my darndest to make sense of all the horror, death, and mystery that befalls the Crain family, including what the hell is actually going on with Hill House itself, what happened to Olivia Crain ( Carla Gugino) and why exactly Hugh Crain ( Timothy Hutton) covered it up, what's inside the house's mysterious Red Room, and what were the true identities of The Bent Neck Lady and Luke's imaginary friend, Abigail. Like Shirley Jackson wrote in the spine-chilling intro to the original novel, "it had stood for 80 years and might stand for 80 more."īut overall, Flanagan's dark, sprawling story is less concerned with the ghosts inside the house and more with the people who made it out (mostly) alive. That's one of the points of the show, the eternal nature of this multi-room monster sitting alone in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. It isn't easy to explain the ending of The Haunting of Hill House, because Hill House itself-the daunting, ghost-filled mansion at the center of Mike Flanagan's Netflix series-doesn't end.
