1x01 Steven Sees a Ghost

[6.7/10] My first impression of this show is that it’s a season-length version of The Conjuring, with some back-and-forth in time business for flavor. And that held up through the first episode. You have the big family, the creepy old house, the mom who goes crazy, and in the present (or “now” as it were) some ghost-hunting. I feel the same way about this episode as I did about that movie: there’s some interesting ideas at play, and the visuals and atmosphere are well done, but I just cannot get into the characters are the writing.

I’m willing to cut The Haunting of Hill House a little slack out of the gate here, since it has to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of introducing a number of characters in two different timeframes and hint at enough of the story without giving everything away. I’ll admit, it took me until at least halfway through the episode before I was even clear on how many, similar-looking siblings there were and where everyone was. That’s not necessarily the show’s fault, as it commendably tried to avoid straight up exposition, and instead left us to piece things together, but that makes it easy to spend more of the runtime attempting to keep the family relations straight then just letting the story wash over.

At the same time, these characters are all pretty dull in the early going. Granted, most of them are barely sketched out given the necessity of introducing five siblings, two parents, and various other supporting characters in the span of 60 minutes. But even Steven and Sheryl, who seem the closest to being main characters, feel pretty flat in the early going. The show makes some hay out of the fact that Steven is a writer of ghost stories who doesn't believe in ghosts, but his presence is just so mute that it’s hard to feel any sort of investment in the character.

Plus, the episode is filled to the brim with overwritten monologues and tin-eared dialogue. Every speech in this episode, from the widow’s description of her nightmare to Steve’s responsive explanation of what the mind sees or the meaning of “supernatural,” to his mom’s description of his religious education just screams, “I’m some guy hunching over my laptop trying to be profound.” The actress who plays the widow in particular sells it like hell, but the words are so unnatural that it dampens the viewer’s ability to process the characters as human beings. With tepid dialogue and flat performances in the opening frame, it’s really hard for me to get on board.

That said, there’s some really good work visually in the opening episode. While there’s a certain washed out, almost sepia-toned tinge to everything. There’s creative transitions between past and present, cool effects and makeup on the ghouls and goblins, and some striking framing and blocking for individual scenes. I have to admit, most of the scares didn’t really get me, but a lot of them rely on fairly old horror tricks, so maybe I’m just inured to them.

Overall, not a particularly promising start, but there’s a lot of throat-clearing here, so I’m willing to give the show some room to grow now that it has that out of the way.

Slow (but that's to be expected) but interesting enough start. And high production quality. Discreet horror, not too strong on the jump scare, that's a good sign.

The format seems to be alternating present and flashbacks. We know something happened, but we'll only discover it little by little.

A common failure with this format is that because, as viewers, we don't know what happened in the past as the present event occur, a lot of suspenseful stuff happens. But contrary to us, the characters have already experienced the past events that will only be revealed to us at the end,and they should be behaving according to this experience, not if they discovered it at the same time we see the flashbacks. And very often the movie/show will fail to do so. Very often, when you reach the end, what is revealed from the past renders most the characters' behavior at the beginning totally incoherent. Hoping they avoid that here.

So Steve, became a horror author. A bit cliche, but ok. However he never saw anything and seems quite good at identifying the rational explanation. Cool. Makes the final scene with Nell even better.

Shirley coped by being a mortician. That's a nice one.

And Luke by becoming an addict. Classic. High future suicide potential.

The night club girl is a sister too ? I don't think we saw her as a kid in the intro ?

So obviously something happened in the house. For now it seems like regular haunting story, plus either the mother going crazy and/or the father killing her. And classically something weird with the help that probably know too much.