If Hill House is personified as a monster that feeds on its inhabitants, the family unit itself is also personified as a kind of organism that thrives on suffering in the form of co-dependency. It’s what they do with the knowledge that their metaphorical and physical home is being haunted that finally allows them to come together and cope with the past. While the fixers try to make excuses for their encounters with the paranormal, the flailers lose themselves to drugs or mental illness, becoming the very apparitions they struggle to escape.Īll of them see ghosts. Then there are the flailers, who are able to articulate their pain vividly but ultimately succumb to the darkness. There are the fixers, who try to deal with the madness they encounter with logical attempts to make things right. Each of the seven members of the Crain family, who spend a terrifying and life-changing summer together in the regal and frightening manor known as Hill House, fits into a loosely defined group. Of course, in the world of the series, the desire for logic, reason, and order is simply no match for pain. It’s an idea that is echoed in the final moments of the series, when Hugh’s son Steve, always his father’s eager helper, apologizes to his own wife: “I just want to fix this,” he tells her, as she moves to embrace him. “I can fix this,” he repeats over and over again, as though saying it will make it true.
In one scene towards the end of Hill House, we see the father character, Hugh, holding his dead wife in his arms. The Haunting of Hill House’s allegiance to feelings over facts seems to hit a particularly potent nerve in a cultural moment when many people feel increasingly powerless to enact change in a world that often feels cruel, overwhelming and downright scary.
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