The Haunting of Ill House

by Pierre-Olivier Toulza

I first saw Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018) during the 2020 lockdown and was puzzled by its rejection, and even erasure, of the novel it claims to be adapting. Indeed, its emphasis on male characters radically undermines the novel’s concern with solitary and unstable girls in ‘an attempt to steal the voice of women’.[1] However, Flanagan’s series resonates with the spirit of gothic fiction through its focus on claustrophobia and domestic confinement, themes often explored in Shirley Jackson’s most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962).

I was not alone in 2020 in being drawn to these literary, cinematic, or televisual fictions of haunted houses. Nevertheless, during that first lockdown, I often turned to movies or television series as mere escapist fiction. Romantic comedies and horror series were among my favorites, and The Haunting of Hill House is one of them. My video reflects on the ambivalent relationship I had with this series, which became a soothing and comforting object, but also a disturbing one, even beyond its nature as horrific fiction and the fact that its story was relatable at a time when so many people could feel trapped in their homes.

In this video, I focus less on the theme of confinement and more on the disturbing motifs of illness that the series unfolds from episode to episode. It is also a way to reconnect with the troubled heroines of Shirley Jackson’s novels. Here, the series addresses a major preoccupation of gothic fiction, which is often interested in ‘the politics of disease’,[2] and tends to present ‘the body as ruin’.[3] Surprisingly, the more I needed a break from COVID, the more Hill House reminded me of my concerns about face masks, or about wearing gloves while grocery shopping.

Although I am not trying to underline a direct connection between the movie and the television series, my video is based on a parallel with Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. This parallel allows me to emphasise my amazement at discovering recurring motifs that I had never expected to find in a haunted house television series. Each of the three parts of my video is centered around an epigraph I took from a quote by Andrew Smith,[4] and begins with a few shots from Soderbergh’s film, before focusing on visual motifs used in the series. As my use of Contagion as a red thread suggests, my video is not meant to be explanatory, as an academic article on the claustrophobia and illness motifs in this series would have been. Rather, my aim is to use the poetic aspects of the video essay form in order to recapture the discomfort that this series provoked in me through its unexpected connections to a specific reception context.

Author

Pierre-Olivier Toulza is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Université Paris Cité. His research interests include classical Hollywood cinema and contemporary American television series. He is the author of Backstage: scènes et coulisses des séries musicales (Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2021) and Homeland: les complots contre l’Amérique (Atlande, 2022). He co-edited Star Turns in Hollywood Musicals (Presses du réel, 2017) and Politiques du musical hollywoodien (Presses universitaires de Nanterre, 2020).

References

Grizzaffi, C. and Scomazzon, G. ‘Stories of Haunted Houses: Female Subjects and Domestic Spaces in Contemporary Gothic Films and TV Series’, [in]Transition, Vol. 8, N° 2, 2021.

Murphy, P. The new woman gothic: Reconfigurations of distress. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016.

Smith, A. Victorian demons: Medicine, masculinity and the gothic at the fin-de-siècle. Manchester-New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.Smith, A. ‘Children of the Night: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Female Gothic’ in The female gothic, new directions, edited by D. Wallace and A. Smith. London: Palgrave, 2009: 152-165.

[1] Grizzaffi & Scomazzon 2021.
[2] Smith 2004.
[3] Murphy 2016.
[4] Smith 2009.