I stopped watching Westworld this season. The main reason for it was that I found the show to become far too pretentious for its own good. The show has nice ideas. But, as the second season plodded along there was an equal amount of silly, leading-nowhere ideas just filling up screentime without any purpose (the whole feudal Japan-storyline).
The reason I´m telling you this is because the first five episodes of The haunting of Hill house reminded me of the worst of Westworld season two.
To stay with this comparison: The opening sequence of The haunting of Hill house
is like Westworld's starting with a white statue stuck in a maze –screaming this time.
And yes, since it is Netflix, there is a nipple present somewhere in this opening montage.
It’s like there's a formula at work; like the Netflix formula is known to me now, which makes The haunting of Hill house a bit of an uneven viewing.
I know my Hill house.
To start with me. I know my Hill house. The book by Shirley Jackson is a must read for anybody who wants to learn about smooth dialogue writing, The 1950s movie is charming and definitely intriguing on a psychological level but, alas, also a bit outdated by today’s standards.
Then there’s the nineties version by Jan de Bont which, even though lavish and charming at times, is a CGI overkill with a ramshackle plot.
Which is strange if you consider how perfectly balanced the original book is.
Of course there are other movies that play with the Hill house template like the two crazy House on Haunted Hill-movies, Stephen King’s Rose Red and many others (most recently Winchester).
So, settling in for this new interpretation of the famous haunted house I had to be won over. Trust me when I tell you that the first few episodes didn’t.
Horror from the start.
One big hurdle to overcome in the very first episode is the rather blunt up front statement: “yes this house is haunted!” There’s no ambiguity, no maybe/ maybe not.
Though I appreciate the honesty it does hack away at the mystery. Even though everybody in the audience knows full well that the house will turn out to be haunted it is the ‘pretend’/easing in that an audience needs.
For a short moment an audience needs status quo –or reality to get accustomed to (including getting to know the characters) before a storyteller is allowed to pull the rug from underneath them.
This is the absolute basics in (horror) writing and structure and this is where –I think- the main faults of Hill house lie.
Horror structure.
The series is structured like LOST. Each of the first five episodes focusses on a character (a member of the family) with the occasional flashback to his/her past.
In which It's a bit strange that the characters look exactly the same in the 'two years ago'
segments as they do in the 'yesterday' bit (unshaven beard and all).
The central mystery obscured.
Usually, in ‘TV land’, this structure works. Yes there will sometimes be a character you aren't interested in. But overall the good overtakes the bad. However, in Hill house the main starting mystery isn't strong enough to keep the attention per character.
LOST had a plane crash, Heroes had various people discovering powers, Rome started with finding a golden eagle as the MacGuffin to start the show. Hill house, expects you to be interested in the character from the get go without the ‘spark’ to set things in motion.
SPOILER: I believe that the Nell episode should have been placed as the opening episode.
Then you have a character to care for who then dies setting up the mystery and getting the
rest of the family members (and all their back-story) together.
Instead we get an inside look in the lives of various people without giving any reason why the audience should invest in the characters. A structure like, of instance, Twins Peaks could've worked better here as you glimpse into a character's life for a span of five minutes or so.
The main characters obscured.
Because of this approach the show lacks a main character or anchor. Michiel Huisman is the first name on the credits, but after episode one he's hardly in the show until the end. Even LOST had Jack; even though he wasn't the most interesting character he was the anchor the audience needed to care for the other characters simply because he was always around.
Instead the show hops around from brother to sister without actually giving the viewer a sense that they are ‘in it together’. Because the minute you know a character the show moves on to the next and only shows glimpses of the character who was before.
The bloating.
Then there’s ‘the bloating’. The haunting of Hill house is ten episodes long. Yet the basic story it tells would only take one episode, at most. The rest of the screen time is filled with character studies.
For the sake of honesty: making a ten hour horror movie is difficult
(for a lot of horrors 90 minutes is stretching it).
Yes, even though the characters are with faults (and, therefore interesting) I couldn’t help feeling that a lot of scenes were taking far longer than they had to. Like the show had to give everybody lines to make the episode runningtime.
Take for instance the whole 'one last hit'-speech in episode five or the 'sisters-car-crash-explanation'-scene one episode later. Both scenes could easily have cut a minute or two to smooth it out.
It got so bad that I started thinking about The Walking Dead. This is a show that has too many episodes to fill with too little money for the zombie action –thus it uses quarrelling characters. Hill house is a ghost story, you don't need any expensive blood and gore -a spotlight and some shadows is enough. Yet still this show feels stretched beyond limits. Each and every episode could easily have cut fifteen minutes.
In fact a six episode show run would've helped Hill house tremendously on a structural level. Especially if you consider that some episodes last a full hour whilst others barely make the forty minute mark.
Also, for a show called: The haunting at Hill house only 30 percent
of the runningtime actually takes place at the house.
Horror dialogue.
The difference between good en bad writing: Good writing takes a normal situation and changes it a little bit and by doing so asks questions about it. So, for instance, a germaphobe at a fancy dress dinner.The situation is normal, the person is a bit different. The result will put a magnifying glass on the average fancy dress dinner.
Bad writing, however, takes a silly situation and presents it as normal. So, for instance, the world of The haunting of Hill House (just episode 2 alone) assumes that every parent wants their kid to look inside the coffin at a wake. And, also that, every undertaker is allowed to treat deceased relatives.
This is just utterly silly. Moreover, it is silly and it doesn’t work on a character level. It is supposed to define the Shirley Crain-character as somebody with a (strange) scientific approach to death but instead it makes her unrelatable.
Also, occasionally, there are some of the scare scenes which were obviously written
by somebody who adores Ancient Aliens because it uses the same logic spectrum:
Something ever so remotely, slightly extraordinary happens: it must be ghosts
so let’s have our child actors scream from the top of their lungs.
But, good or bad writing, there’s nothing worse than unfitted dialogue ruining a scene.
Take, for instance, the endscene in episode one. Anybody with half a brain can see this scene coming for miles. But still it is a fun little scene even with all its predictability.
However the dialogue that the main character has over the phone with his father and then the monotonous “Steve...Steve...Steve…” as you wait for the screen to cut to black is atrocious.
It completely destroys that what could have been ‘good enough’. The scene is not perfect – if you want perfect you’d have to watch the similar scene in Stir of Echoes- but with the terrible dialogue it actually becomes worse than it would have been if you left the sound out.
Also: "Don't let go of your cup of stars!" -really?
Or my favourite example: A gigantic chandelier falls in episode 6
and the dialogue is literally: "let's move this out of the way I don't want anybody tripping over it!"
Horror acting.
On a structural level I believe the show could've done with one or two less brothers or sisters. In this sense Hill house is the cable rehash of The conjuring-franchise. But where Whan is bound by real life cases Hill house is not. Moreover, Whan wisely puts some of the less important characters in the background. Hill house puts them front and centre with dialogue which stretches the underwritten characters too thin.
Now instead of (let's say) three fully developed characters - with a childhood back story no less- we have seven partly developed characters.
True, you can't have a horror without some cannonfodder. Some people need to die (even though a lot less people die in your average horror movie than they do in an crime of the week show). But, then you have to put the deaths of the ‘lesser characters’ in early as to not stretch them out.
I understand the power of the number seven but still, not everything needs to be connected to myth.
Still the actors give their best with the material handed to them.
Carla Gugino, here, is the best off. This actress who recently gave a wonderful one woman show in Gerald's game (2017), is nicely at ease in this crooked tale. From a loving mother her character gradually changes into a deranged ghost of her former self.
However, the order in which you see this happen is all over the place; so like a Brechtian play you never really get to care for her character.
The same basically goes for every adult sibling who, as I said, are in one episode and utterly forgotten the few after that.
When it comes to the acting of the children we can -by now- call Lulu Wilson a genre powerhouse or Scream-queen as the title goes. The young actress –a brunette this time ‘round- is more than capable in her role as the oldest daughter of the household. Which, however, contrasts massively with her younger onscreen siblings who aren’t as gifted in the craft yet.
Normally the directing would hide away from this. Young children (often) can't act so, as a kind director you use all kinds of tricks to make their acting believable; either by directing them on set, using the camera to move the focus away a bit or ,on the basic script level, hiding them in the background. For some strange reason this doesn't happen in Hill house which, unfortunately, makes each and every scene with the youngest kids annoying (also: Twins? Really?).
Unfortunately it aren’t merely the children who suffer this fate. Even the adults suffer from the occasional strange acting directing.
There are some (obvious) none smokers who then pretend they've been smoking for years
-Just a tip, don't shove the filter half-way down your throat.
As a result of this each and every episode is littered with uncomfortable silences and Joey-Tribbiany styled acting of adult actors not really being able to get in the motions of things.
Horror directing.
It is, however, quite clear early on that the showmaker only wanted to do the visual (horror) part and used the clunky character work as a means to get there. A wreck of a car with great rims as it were.
An example of this is the lighting conundrum in episode 3. This episode has a great flashlight scare scene but quickly follows it up with a fully lit out basement (with lamps that still work after fifty years) when the character work takes centre stage. Why not keep that scene dark as well? There's not even a reason to fully light the scene -I'm watching a horror show after all.
From episode 6 on.
Episode 6 is the episode in which the ball(s) finally start rolling. The family is together and now both the mystery (e.g. the red door) is addressed and the family starts to interact as a whole. Moreover, this episode finally gives the viewer a much needed breakdown of the layout of the house. This episode the show needed as a breath of fresh air to blow out the cobwebs gathered by five full hours of uninteresting characters and story development.
like The Lord of the Rings books you have to work through the first sixty pages before you get into the swing of things. -Tolkien being the better author.
Actually it is halfway episode five the show becomes interesting.
The episode still stretches on too long (that whole dance sequence) plus it has
the annoying tendency to over explain itself. Still it was a step in the right direction.
The final trick the show pulls that episode doesn't make sense though,
when you think about it, but I'm not complaining - it's something.
Still it is mostly the visual style of this episode that grabbed me even more than the narrative. Episode 6 is basically a few (tricked) long-takes shots after another (and I’m a sucker for longtakes).
Obviously this was the director having a go with the possibilities. In fact, this episode is so much (visual) fun that one starts to wonder why the rest of the show wasn’t in this style. Just imagine, in one of the earlier episodes, a character being introduced and after a while he/she turn a corner in a hallway and the past takes over. It would keep the haunting style and shift some attention away from the strange dialogue.
Now, to be absolutely honest, at the moment this episode is introduced this stage-like style doesn't really contribute to the story anymore because we don't need to be introduced to the characters (we already know them) nor is it needed to increase the tension (the scenes take too long for it).
But it works!
After episode 6 it all starts to get interesting. The dialogue is often still terrible, but now, at least, the show gets to write lengthy monologues of exposition (the ghost monologue or the clock monologue).
Plus the characters are working together with a single goal. Also because the structure starts to line up characters finally start to become full-fledged. Sufficient to say its roundabout episode six that the aforementioned blueprint finally starts to find its stride.
The final episode then is a (predictable) hoot wherein ghosts, the original words of Jackson and all those little misdirections of episodes previous come to play.
Still, it doesn’t make up for five hours of uninteresting drama one has to endure to get there.
Escaping Hill House.
I didn't benchwatch this show. I couldn't -I really wanted to give it an honest chance. But each and every early episode starts out well enough (me full of hope) and then it springs some strange dialogue on me.The haunting of Hill house is a drama about family dynamics first, ghosts second. However, there is no family dynamic in this show without the ghost element. Each and every interaction between characters is about Hill house. This makes the show (or the first five episodes at least) uneven. It (desperately) wants to talk about the ghosts but it constantly prenteds that there is something 'more important' to talk about.
The two main problems with Hill house are the structure and dialogue (plus troublesome actor-directing). The show would have benefitted greatly from reshuffled forty-five minute episodes. Instead it feels bloated and uncaring. In the end it was episode six that saved it for me. But with a lackbuster ghoststory, out of order (the literal sense) character development and deviously inept dialogue I just can't warm up to giving it the praise people (online) are giving this show. The haunting of Hill house (apart from episode six) is mediocre at best.
A final note: IMDB was freaking me out!
As I was checking reviews -because I couldn't truly believe that I was the only one who might find this show troublesome- I found all kinds of reviews on IMDB.com that praised the show into oblivion.
But, when I clicked the name of the reviewer it was often a single review reviewer. No other movies or shows reviewed, only The haunting of Hill house.
This freaked me out. Does this show have such a following that people are willing to write a single review on IMDB.com? Or, is there some kind of bot-programme at work?
If this last suggestion is the case Netflix is a lot more powerful and a lot more insecure than we 'all' thought it was.
1 comment:
Are you going to review “The Fall of the House of Usher” as well?
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