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The Cast of Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor Are Ready for More Seasons

"The stories are boundless."

• Both are created by Mike Flanagan, and feature a similar cast, including Victoria Pedretti and Henry Thomas.
• Here's what we know about a third season, and why one seems likely.

Netflix is home to two of our favorite haunted house shows —and more could be on the way. First came The Haunting of Hill House , Mike Flanagan's radical re-envisioning of Shirley Jackson's book of the same name. The Haunting of Bly Manor , out October 9, works with Henry James' famous works of horror, most notably A Turn of the Screw .

Given this pattern, will there be a third installment in Flanagan's Haunting series? If the cast has any say in the matter, the answer is a resounding yes. Much like Ryan Murphy's horror anthology American Horror Story , the Haunting series features the same actors playing new characters—and "the regulars" are open to returning.

"The stories are boundless," Henry Thomas, who appears in both series, tells OprahMag.com. "Though Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor are both horror genre, they deal with so much more than your average horror genre piece. We're dealing with big themes."

While Bly Manor and Hill House both feature ghosts (lots of 'em, in fact), the shows are as concerned with exploring what ghosts represent as creating jump scares. Take Bly Manor 's tagline, "Dead doesn't mean gone." In another horror work, this sentence would be purely foreboding. Within the context of Bly , though, it raises the notion of connecting with loved ones after death.

However, there's not much of a chance that the third "season" of The Haunting of Hill House will come out next October, due to coronavirus-related delays. Here's what we know about the future of Netflix's Haunting series.

The Haunting of... series has not been renewed. Yet.

But we're hopeful. The Haunting of Hill House was a downright phenomenon in 2018, with the "Bent Neck Lady" showing up in our memes and our collective nightmares. The Haunting of Bly Manor is drumming up similar anticipation among viewers.

Should audiences exhibit demand, then we're confident about season 3. Further, the series lends itself to future seasons. Flanagan is riffing off of classic works of horror literature. There's far more where Shirley Jackson and Henry James came from.

Don't plan on it coming out next October, though.

There was a two-year gap between The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor , and we might have to wait even longer for future Haunting installments. While Flanagan has begun production on another series (more on that, later), there have been widespread production delays due to the coronavirus pandemic.

What spooky mansion will the third season of Haunting focus on? We have ideas.

Haunted houses never get old—and literature proves it. There are countless famous books about houses in which human and ghostly inhabitants coincide. We can suggest a few.

• The Good House by Tananarive Due begins when a woman inherits her ancestor's house, and is haunted by an ancient spirit.
• In The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons, a couple becomes convinced the house next door to them is haunted.
• Stephen King called Hell House by Richard Matheson one of the scariest haunted house books ever written.
• Or, if Flanagan wants to play with the idea of haunting more than actual ghosts, he can turn to Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier.

The setting of Bly Manor could give a clue about the next season, too.

Flora's wedding takes place in a historic hotel in California. Based on the exchange of scary stories in the first episode, the hotel used to be a convent. The ghost of a nun roams the hallways. Perhaps it will be the inspiration for season 3 of the Haunting series. Flanagan hasn't attempted nuns yet.

If season 3 happens, it will feature the same cast, more or less.

This much is for sure: The next season will feature at least a few of the regular cast members. Victoria Pedretti, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Henry Thomas, Carla Gugino, and Katie Siegel have appeared in both seasons—and we have a feeling they'd return for the next one.

The cast of Bly Manor and Hill House don't play favorites between the shows. When asked to decide whether Hill House or Bly Manor is scarier, Jackson-Cohen is torn. "They feel equally haunted. I don't know how much I'd want to live in either," he says. Pedretti, on her end, would rather live in Bly. "Hill House is really not a properly operating house. At least in Bly the lights work," she says.

For now, watch out for Flanagan's next horror series on Netflix.

Haunting may not be around the corner—but another Flanagan project is. Production on Flanagan's next Netflix horror series , Midnight Mass , began in August. Midnight Mass will feature two Haunting regulars–Henry Thomas and Kate Siegel, who happens to be Flanagan's wife.

Day 1... here we go. pic.twitter.com/dnMf7wKXk1 — Mike Flanagan (@flanaganfilm) August 17, 2020

Midnight Mass is related to another one of Flanagan's works. In Hush , Flanagan's 2016 movie, a masked killer stalks author Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) in her remote home. Young is the author of a book called—you guessed it— Midnight Mass. The book also shows up in the Netflix movie Gerald's Game , which Flanagan directed. Looks like Netflix is becoming the new site of the Mike Flanagan horror universe, and we can't wait to be scared.

For more stories like this, sign up for our newsletter .

Elena Nicolaou is the former culture editor at Oprah Daily. 

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'The Haunting of Hill House' Ending Explained: The Red Room, Bent Neck Lady, & More

"It had stood for 80 years and might stand for 80 more."

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. That's one of the points of the show, the eternal nature of this multi-room monster sitting alone in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. 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."

But 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. 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.

Below, 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.

RELATED: Mike Flanagan's Netflix Shows Ranked From 'Midnight' to 'Manor'

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. It's the archetypal haunted house because it just is . 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 got most of the Hill family, most grotesquely William Hill, who bricked himself behind a wall in the basement in 1948.

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. They're like fuel for a fucked up machine. 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.

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. Like the scariest creatures, the house is just hungry . 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."

Olivia Crain

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. (She explained them away as migraines.)

Summed up, the house convinced Olivia that her family needed to die. But the show heartbreakingly sets this up as an extension of Olivia's genuine love as a mother. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Abigail and The Dudleys

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. The show paints the mysterious Abigail as Luke's imaginary friend (or ghost), just another delusion conjured up by Hill House. 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. Dudley come with the house," a young Steven tells Clara Dudley ( Annabeth Gish )—who live through the woods on the outskirts of town.

The Dudleys have experience with the messed up happenings of Hill House. Mr. 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. And then the Dudleys' first child died in childbirth (which explains why they kept Abigail under tight lock and key) followed by a very familiar cry echoing throughout Hill House. "We stopped coming here after dark," Mr. Dudley tells Hugh. "Once dinner is served we leave, come back in the morning for the dishes."

After the deaths of both Olivia and Abigail, the Dudleys demand Hugh Crain leave Hill House standing—Hugh wanted to burn it to the ground, very understandably—because as long as the house is there the Dudleys can interact with the ghost of their dead daughter. It's super depressing and kind of beautiful all at once.

RELATED: 'Haunting of Bly Manor' EPs on That Ending, Ghost Rules, Horror Fandom, and Much More

The Red Room

The room behind Hill House's ever-locked Red Door is kind of like The Room of Requirement from the Harry Potter books, except for possessing your mind and driving you batshit insane. It's how the house keeps its residents complacent in the face of constant horror. It's whatever the residents need to stay sane as they slowly lose their minds without realizing it. It was a toy room for the young and rambunctious Nell. A family room for the lonely Shirley. A treehouse when Luke needed to get away.

It also effectively serves as a waystation between the living and the dead; it's where the house converts people into fuel. "Mom says that a house is like a body. And that every house has eyes, and bones, and skin, and a face," Nell says in the finale. "This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart. A stomach."

The Bent Neck Lady

Time doesn't seem to matter much inside of Hill House. Olivia Crain sees her children grow into adults and ultimately lie dead on a mortuary table. Steven sees the events of his mother's death played over and over again in front of him. But the most tragic case is poor Nell Crain, who as a child was haunted by a specter she called The Bent Neck Lady, a horrific shadowy ghoul with her head twisted disturbingly to the side.

Hill House reveals that the Bent Neck Lady is Nell herself, decades in the future, hanging from a rope that the house convinced her to tie with her neck broken. When Nell jumped—or, more appropriately, was pushed—from the top of the spiral staircase, she fell through time and memory, one last-ditch effort to warn herself about the inevitable misery to come.

The ending of The Haunting of Hill House doubles as a beginning for the Crain family, both the ones who get out alive and those who wind up a permanent part of the house's black parade. The series climaxes with a horrific night inside Hill House that shows the Crain siblings the worst nights of their lives or the worst parts of themselves; the business trip where Shirley cheated on her husband, Luke's up-and-down addiction, Steven's inability to see the people who care about him right in front of his house, etc, etc. The show even makes this theme a bit too clear by having Steven voice-over the metaphor at the end: "Ghosts are guilt. Ghosts are secrets. Ghosts are regrets and failings."

But either way, being confronted with their own failures bonds the Crains, who escape Hill House one more time and resolve, once and for all, to maybe stop being so dang angry at each other. Except for Hugh Crain, that is; the father of the family, who didn't have much of a life post-Hill House to begin with, makes a pact with Olivia's ghost, who's trying to trap the siblings in the Red Room, kill them, and keep them with her in the house forever. Hugh downs the rest of his pills and dies quietly on the spiral staircase, spending the afterlife roaming a Massachusetts mansion with his wife and youngest daughter.

With Hugh gone, responsibility over the house falls to Steven, which basically just entails making sure nobody ever touches it. Hill House may be filled to the brim with ghouls but a good deal of those ghouls love each other. As long as Hill House, not sane, still stands those ghosts can be together forever.

We see proof of this in one last touching coda. An older Mr. Dudley carries his wife through the woods to die in Hill House so she can see her two daughters again; the one who died too soon and the one she never got to love at all. Netflix's Haunting of Hill House ends on a much cheerier update of Shirley Jackson's chill-inducing opening paragraph.

"Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet neatly, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House," Steven says in voice-over. "And those who walk there, walk together."

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Home > The Haunting of Hill House > Miniseries

The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

The Haunting of Hill House

What to know

Critics Consensus

The Haunting of Hill House is an effective ghost story whose steadily mounting anticipation is just as satisfying as its chilling payoff. Read critic reviews

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1. Steven Sees a Ghost

Air date: Oct 12, 2018

While investigating a ghost story for his latest novel, skeptical Steven receives a call from his sister that triggers a chain of fateful events.

2. Open Casket

A devastating family tragedy stirs memories of traumatic losses, reminding Shirley of her first brush with death -- and awakening long-dormant fears.

Keenly perceptive Theo sees shades of herself in a troubled young patient, a girl who's haunted by the menacing grin of "Mr. Smiley."

4. The Twin Thing

Still wrestling with addiction -- and an unshakable fright -- frantic Luke tries to save a friend while sensing his twin sister is in danger.

5. The Bent-Neck Lady

A dark specter with an unsettling silhouette has haunted Nell since she was a girl; now "the Bent-Neck Lady" is back -- and she's calling Nell home.

6. Two Storms

It's a reunion for all the wrong reasons when Hugh flies in for the funeral, coming face to face with his estranged children on a dark, stormy night.

As the Crains gather to say their final goodbyes, a flashback reveals Mr. Dudley's connection to the house -- and exposes a secret in the walls.

8. Witness Marks

A familiar terror revisits Shirley and Theo on Halloween night as Hugh and Steve go looking for Luke, who disappeared on a deadly errand.

9. Screaming Meemies

While struggling to discern dreams from reality, Olivia fears for her children's safety, a motherly instinct Mrs. Dudley urges her to embrace.

10. Silence Lay Steadily

The Red Room's contents are finally revealed as the Cranes return to the house to confront old ghosts, unspeakable secrets and an insatiable evil.

The Haunting of Hill House: Miniseries videos

The haunting of hill house: miniseries   photos, tv season info.

• Genres: Drama, Horror
• Network: Netflix
• Premiere Date: Oct 12, 2018
• Executive producers: Mike Flanagan , Trevor Macy , Meredith Averill , Justin Falvey , Darryl Frank

Cast & Crew

Michiel Huisman

Steven Crain

Carla Gugino

Timothy Hutton

Elizabeth Reaser

Shirley Crain

Oliver Jackson-Cohen

Henry Thomas

Young Hugh Crain

Kate Siegel

Theodora Crain

Victoria Pedretti

Lulu Wilson

Young Shirley

Mckenna Grace

Paxton Singleton

Young Steven

Violet McGraw

Julian Hilliard

Russ Tamblyn

Dr. Montague

Mike Flanagan

Executive Producer

Trevor Macy

Meredith Averill

Justin Falvey

Darryl Frank

News & Interviews for The Haunting of Hill House

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View All The Haunting of Hill House News

Critic Reviews for The Haunting of Hill House: Miniseries

Audience reviews for the haunting of hill house: miniseries.

Such a good show. Great acting, cast, and characters. Good twists and scares. Really recommend this. Just as a warning though, there is one unpleasant scene involving kittens.

Superb. Flanagan's at his best with this series. Excellent cast, strong story, and slick cinematography. It would have been even better with the alternate ending (No spoilers here, though).

Loved it and wished there were more episodes! It's a great one...

Wish there were more shows like this one, unreal acting, unreal writing, absolutely crushed it.

This is one of my all-time favorite shows! I love the themes explored, the creative set designs, the incredible 17-minute scene without cuts, and some other little details Flanagan threw in (if you know you know).

A great show with an engaging plot, but they could have done without the cheap jumpscares just to get the 'horror' label on the genre and the show would have remained as good.

I have never seen anything in horror quite like Hill House. Although it is only loosely based on the Shirley Jackson novel which I am also a fan. The little nods to it make it worth while. Mike Flanagan has found a way to layer a story back and forth in a "Memento" type way that just throws you for a loop! It's full of grief, trauma, and many twist and turns. Flanagan made a story unmatched! Unlike anything you've seen. And unlike anything you'll ever see again. 10/10

I'm reviewing episode one as I did not enjoy it and won't be watching the rest of the season. I found it really unengaging and quite boring. This is a drama and not a horror like I was expecting. House on Haunted Hill (1999) is far more entertaining. There are ghosts but there is so much talking that you forget all about it. If you are into supernatural dramas then you will probably enjoy this. There's nothing wrong with the production, it's very well made, I just didn't connect with it at all.

In my opinion, every horror-related media should be a show from now on. The fleshed-out characters and relationships really elevate this series from being your traditional horror affair into being a riveting family tragedy which makes the actual horror scenes not just more terrifying but also sad. It also the has the best jumpscare i've ever seen (and even that doesn't feel cheap or out of place.)

One of the greatest pieces of TV of all times, in my opinion. A beautifully intricate story, filmed with incredible integrity. The amount of detail pushed into each and every frame, and the care with which the creators of this masterpiece have put into every aspect make this spooky horror mini-series one of the most compelling shows you're going to see in your life. Don't miss out on it, even if you aren't a horror fan. Give it a shot.

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Critic’s Notebook

‘The Haunting of Hill House,’ on Netflix, Is a Family Drama With Scares

By Jason Zinoman

• Oct. 11, 2018

Shirley Jackson was a writer who understood that good scares come to those who wait, but she also knew how to get to the point.

Her classic 1959 novella “The Haunting of Hill House” begins with the greatest opening paragraph in the history of horror, describing the doomed mansion from the title, curiously, as insane, before ending with this ominous phrase: “whatever walked there, walked alone.”

The new Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House” — a loose adaptation that ambitiously marries the terrors of a ghost story with an intricate, multigenerational family drama — opens with a reading of this passage, which suggests fealty to source material. But if you listen closely, you might notice that the perspective has radically shifted, away from the book’s omniscient narrator and toward the man speaking.

That man is Steven Crain (Michiel Huisman), who wrote a best-selling book based on his family’s experience in a haunted house. He called it “The Haunting of Hill House.”

[ Looking for more haunted house stories? Try one of these 13 creepy books . ]

In just its first few seconds, this series pays homage to Shirley Jackson while erasing her at the same time, an apt analogy for this entire enterprise that should delight and frustrate horror fans in equal measure. Jackson makes a return of sorts in the next episode, in the form of a girl in the background reading Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” A world in which Jackson wrote “The Lottery” but not “The Haunting of Hill House” makes no sense, but when it comes to tales of the supernatural, a rigid adherence to logic is distinctly overrated.

Every adaptation of a great horror story implicitly attempts to answer the same question: What part of this source material is the scariest?

Robert Wise’s masterly 1963 movie “The Haunting” rested on the idea that no ghost is as terrifying as the anticipation of its arrival. The horror is in the suggestion, the teasing of the monster that never shows its face. Stephen King, who once tried his hand at adapting Jackson’s book for a TV series called “Rose Red,” called it “one of the world’s few radio horror movies.”

As much as he revered the book and the movie, King was skeptical of their extreme discretion — he called it playing for the tie rather than the win — and as horror became blunter and special effects and makeup more sophisticated, it became harder to keep monsters in the closet.

Jan De Bont’s 1999 remake, also titled “The Haunting,” indulged in computer-generated effects, which partly accounts for its critically reviled reputation. But the movie makes a credible argument for the scariest element of Jackson’s story: Hill House itself. De Bont painstakingly lingers on its creepy statues, iron gates and precarious spiral staircase, and the ornate and wonderfully eccentric design upstages the actors in almost every scene.

Mike Flanagan, who created the Netflix show and directed every episode, went in a completely different direction. While his series is by no means full of gore, he shows plenty of the supernatural, introducing some very spooky ghosts including a bent-necked woman and an extremely tall floater in a bowler hat. And more riskily, he strays farther from Hill House than previous adaptations do, which sacrifices some of the claustrophobia that a good haunted house story can generate.

Hill House is constantly anthropomorphized in the book, but instead of using design to show it to us, Flanagan has a character deliver a long monologue about how the house is like a body. It’s striking that the best episode of the series takes place outside of Hill House and in a funeral parlor, and it unfolds almost entirely through a few virtuosic tracking shots.

[ Stream “The Haunting,” “The Orphanage” or six other haunted house movies. ]

Flanagan previously directed the Stephen King adaptation “Gerald’s Game,” one of Netflix’s best horror movies and one so rooted in one place that it had the feel of a play. But he has made a version of “Hill House” in which the terrors of the haunted mansion are less prominent than those of the people and relationships in it. Like other directors contributing to the current renaissance of mature horror , he is drawn to the psychology of traumatized characters, to how apparitions can seem like the manifestation of a fragile mental state.

Instead of telling the story from the book about a group of strangers who are invited to the house by a doctor to study the supernatural, the series dispenses with this medical conceit and focuses on the dysfunctional relationships in a family who once stayed in Hill House. That family, a couple (Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas) with five children, moved into the house in order to renovate and flip it. Instead of making a profit, they paid dearly, and what happened in the house haunts each child through adulthood.

Its fractured plot, darting back and forth from childhood to adulthood, underlines how horrific events lodge themselves in your psyche. Early on, we see the father frantic, gathering his kids and fleeing to a hotel. Whatever happened that night hangs over all 10 episodes, and before revealing it, Flanagan shows how the past haunts the present.

The worst fear in this “Hill House” is not walking alone, but with your relatives. Steven Crain writes a tell-all book that makes him famous, but it also divides the family because his sister Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) thinks he is exploiting family tragedy. Theodora (Kate Siegel) works as a child psychologist, which also brings up gothic memories, and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) struggles with addiction. The most rattled child might be Nell (Victoria Pedretti), whose fragile state echoes that of Eleanor Vance from the original book and leads her back to Hill House and a reunion of the whole family. (Timothy Hutton plays the older version of the Crain patriarch.)

For horror — which has a tradition of thinly drawn victims and wildly evocative monsters, and of isolating people in space or in cabins in the woods instead of moving them around in dense narratives — this is a ton of plot, not to mention the many long theatrical speeches. And Flanagan has woven it together cleverly, with winks at fans of the original story and surprising bits of connective tissue across generations. It’s an intricate, emotionally gripping and sprawling story, but its scale does seem to come at the expense of scares.

The major turning points in the series hinge on familial lies, odd coincidence and decisions that are the stuff of midlife crisis novels set in the suburbs of Connecticut, not gothic tales of the uncanny. If it weren’t for the periodic bug crawling out of a corpse’s mouth or a floating ghost peering underneath a child’s bed, you could confuse “The Haunting of Hill House” for a kitchen-sink drama. For those worried that horror has become so sober and mature that it is losing some of its fun, there is some evidence to found in this solemnly affecting series.

The biggest challenge for horror in the age of streaming might be pacing. Getting this right is as important in scary scenes as it is in jokes. This series is deliberate and slow, but it conforms to traditional episodic television structure. Episodes start and end with shocks, and while they are often quite effective, the scares don’t escalate. Flanagan has made an intelligent, engaging supernatural story in which the tension doesn’t mount so much as stop and start, and occasionally sputter.

A New Golden Age of Comedy

Since getting fired from “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 after videos surfaced of him using Asian and gay slurs on a podcast, Shane Gillis has built perhaps one of the fastest growing comedy careers in America .

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In roast battles and stage shows, comics are experimenting with facing off against A.I. chatbots. But inspired stand-ups shouldn’t fear for their jobs — yet .

A new generation of stand-up comedians is mining the loss of a loved one for ambitious, heartbreaking shows. How did we get here ?

The fabled Joan Rivers card catalog of jokes is being donated to the National Comedy Center. Take a look at some of the artifacts from her archive .

The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

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The Haunting of Hill House

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The Haunting of Hill House is an American horror-anthology series created by Mike Flanagan and based on the gothic novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson. The series follows a family of five and the paranormal experiences that haunt them at Hill House, and how these experiences caused them to flee the house.

The Haunting of Hill House was well-received by critics, who praised the acting, directing, and production qualities. On October 9, 2020, Flanagan released a follow-up series titled The Haunting of Bly Manor , featuring most of the same team and parts of the same cast but a different tale and characters.

• 2 Cast and Characters
• 5.1 Promotional Videos
• 5.2 Promotional Images
• 7 References

Summary [ ]

Cast and characters [ ].

• Timothy Hutton as Hugh Crain
• Carla Gugino as Olivia Crain
• Paxton Singleton as Steven Crain
• Elizabeth Reaser as Shirley Crain
• Kate Segal as Theodora Crain
• Olivia Jackson-Cohen as Luke Crain
• Victoria Pedretti as Eleanor Crain

Episodes [ ]

• Steven Sees a Ghost
• Open Casket
• The Twin Thing
• The Bent-Neck Lady
• Witness Marks
• Screaming Meemies
• Silence Lay Steadily

Gallery [ ]

Promotional videos [ ].

Promotional Images [ ]

See More [ ]

References [ ]

• 1 Hubert Pellegrini
• 2 Ludmilla Makowski
• 3 Benjamin Ferel

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House on Haunted Hill

• 28   Metascore
• 1 hr 36 mins
• Horror, Suspense

The Vincent Price cult classic gets a high-tech makeover in this horror film laced with humor and creepy effects. Geoffrey Rush plays an eccentric tycoon who throws a party at an abandoned asylum and offers $1 million to every guest who stays overnight. Taye Diggs, Famke Janssen, Peter Gallagher.

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1 Haunting Of Hill House Death Explained 5 Years Later In New Show

Posted: October 18, 2023 | Last updated: October 18, 2023

WARNING! This article contains spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher's ending!

• The death of Rufus "Gris" Griswold in The Fall of the House of Usher is reminiscent of William Hill's death in The Haunting of Hill House .
• Gris' fate of being sealed into a brick wall bears a striking resemblance to how William Hill was found in the walls of the titular home in Hill House.
• The Fall of the House of Usher repeats several tragic themes and deaths from The Haunting of Hill House, including blackouts, visions of supernatural figures, burns, and fatal falls.

The mystery surrounding one ghost’s death in The Haunting of Hill House is unexpectedly broken down in Mike Flanagan’s 2023 Netflix horror show The Fall of the House of Usher . While the Flanaverse sees plenty of themes, actors, and elements overlap across the filmmaker’s horror series, the plots and characters aren’t explicitly connected in the same universe. However, Flanagan often returns to certain fates and motifs in his TV shows as nods to his other works, with the fate of one character in The Fall of the House of Usher ’s ending including a connection to his first Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House .

It wouldn’t be the conclusion of a Mike Flanagan horror show without numerous grim character deaths, with The Fall of the House of Usher featuring several across various timelines. Among those who die in The Fall of the House of Usher is Rufus “Gris” Griswold, the former head of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals and young Roderick’s boss. The show’s flashbacks to 1979 reveal that Roderick and Madeline murdered Gris during a work party, having chained him to a wall, sealed him into the Fortunato basement, and let him slowly suffocate and starve to death behind a wall of bricks. Gris’s death is a huge catalyst for the show’s events, which happens to resemble the demise of a Hill House ghost.

Gris's Death In House Of Usher Shows How William Hill Was Killed In Hill House

Gris’ fate of being chained up and fatally sealed into the brick wall of a building is oddly familiar in the Flanaverse, as this was the same death experienced by William Hill in The Haunting of Hill House . When Hugh Crain is tearing down a seemingly mold-infested wall in the titular home, he stumbles upon the body of William Hill, who had been missing since 1948. The Haunting of Hill House revealed that William had “walled” himself in, but ended up trying to scratch his way out. The scratches of William’s ghost trying to escape are often heard by Hugh, similar to Roderick hearing the jingle of the bells of Gris’ jester costume in The Fall of the House of Usher .

While The Haunting of Hill House only depicted the aftermath of William’s death with his skeleton being found in the walls, The Fall of the House of Usher shows the actual process of a character being killed in this manner. Gris’ body is never recovered in The Fall of the House of Usher , so in the same way that the 2023 series explains how William’s death would have happened, Hill House explains what would have become of Gris’ body several decades later. Of course, both deaths and their long-undisturbed burials are homages to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Cask of Amontillado , in which a man is entombed within catacombs.

Related: Every Edgar Allan Poe Poem In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Fall Of The House Of Usher Repeats Several Hill House Tragedies

Gris’ death isn’t the only tragedy in The Fall of the House of Usher that mirrors a character’s tragedies in Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House . The death of Tamerlane Usher bears some similarities to Olivia Crain’s experiences prior to her tragic demise, as both were subject to inexplicable blackouts and visions of supernatural figures. While Tamerlane would see the shape-shifting Verna between her blackouts, Olivia would often see Poppy Hill and other ghosts between her blackouts.

Perry Usher’s death of being burned alive by acid is also similar to the fate of Edward Hill, aka the Basement Ghost, whose mysterious death included severe burns. Furthermore, both Olivia Crain and Napoleon Usher fall to their deaths. Similar to the tragedies that befell The Haunting of Hill House ’s titular family, The Fall of the House of Usher ’s eponymous family experiences gruesome ends.

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• From <i>Hill House</i> to <i>House of Usher</i>: Mike Flanagan’s 5 Netflix Horror Series, Ranked

From Hill House to House of Usher : Mike Flanagan’s 5 Netflix Horror Series, Ranked

F or fans of Netflix horror master Mike Flanagan, the Oct. 12 premiere of his latest show, The Fall of the House of Usher , is bound to be bittersweet. The good news is that House of Usher , an adaptation of not just the eponymous story, but of Edgar Allan Poe ’s bibliography at large, is up there with his best efforts—a return to form for a creator who went a bit astray with last year’s The Midnight Club . The bad news is that it will likely be his last series for Netflix, after Flanagan and his Intrepid Pictures partner Trevor Macy signed an overall deal with Amazon in late 2022. 

To mark the occasion, and celebrate a remarkable run, I’ve ranked the five single-season shows Flanagan has made for Netflix from worst (which isn’t really so awful) to best, with a bit of extra ink on the sublimely vindictive new House of Usher .  

5. The Midnight Club

In my estimation, Flanagan has only made one disappointing season of TV, and this is it. Drawing on unexpected source material for a creator who likes to remix literary classics—the YA horror novels of Christopher Pike— The Midnight Club is set at a hospice for teens. It’s 1994, a year when Pike’s books were flying off middle-school library shelves. Positive-thinking heroine Ilonka (Iman Benson) arrives convinced that the place can cure her terminal cancer. She soon stumbles upon the Midnight Club, a secret nightly gathering where the residents laugh in the face of death by telling each other scary stories that come straight out of Pike’s other work.

There are some wonderful performances here, namely from Ruth Codd (who returns in House of Usher ) as Ilonka’s bitter, angry roommate. But the teen-hospice setting limits Flanagan and co-creator Leah Fong’s ability to capitalize on some of his previous shows’ greatest strengths, from rampant psychosexual intrigue to an excellent troupe of adult actors that included Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, and Victoria Pedretti. Instead of subjecting sick kids to gruesome horrors, The Midnight Club reserves its most grotesque moments for the stories they tell. But the decision to devote so much runtime to these tangentially related tales detracts from the characters, robbing their poignant predicament of specificity and emotional weight.    

4. The Haunting of Hill House

Flanagan’s first Netflix series became a huge surprise hit—and for many of his fans, this extremely loose adaptation of Shirley Jackson ’s National Book Award finalist remains the impossibly high standard against which everything he’s done since must be judged. That’s understandable. Like I said, once you get past Midnight Club , there’s not a failure on this list. How you rank the three middle-of-the-pack entries, in particular, is a matter of taste more than quality.

Hill House pulled in viewers with something that can be hard to find in the horror genre: emotional realism. Straddling the early 1990s and the present, it follows the Crains, a big family that lost its matriarch (Gugino) in the eerie mansion she was helping her husband fix up to flip when the five children were still kids. Each has since been wrestling with grief over her death—and confusion about what really happened in the house the night their father (Timothy Hutton) hustled them into the car while their mom remained inside. Episodes devoted to each child explore their respective damaged psychological landscapes in turn. This is all elegantly done. But, at 10 episodes, the show drags in the second half of the season. Its trauma plot doesn’t have the originality of a Bly Manor or a Midnight Mass . Most of all, I questioned why so many female characters had to die in the service of repairing a father-son relationship.     

3. The Haunting of Bly Manor

Bly Manor over Hill House ? It’s not a popular opinion, I know. And I’ll admit that Flanagan’s second series gets off to a pretty slow start. But, for me, the profound places it ends up going more than justify a sluggish first few episodes. In 1987, a young woman named Dani (Pedretti) is hired to teach and care for two orphaned children at their wealthy uncle’s country estate in the English countryside, following their previous caregiver’s suicide. You guessed it: we’re in an updated take on Henry James’ Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw .

As Dani gets to know her new co-workers on Bly Manor’s household staff, the question arises of why so many talented, once-ambitious people have remained in the “gravity well” of the estate for so many years. Standout performances by T’Nia Miller as the housekeeper and Rahul Kohli as the chef (both return in House of Usher ) paint observant portraits of characters trapped in the domestic sphere by various forms of inequality, most prominently the caste divisions that support their existences as 24/7 servants to an absent owner. What makes this symbolism work so well is that it isn’t a thematic stretch on Flanagan’s part; class anxiety is written into the very fabric of James’ work, and never more hauntingly than in The Turn of the Screw . Also: Bly Manor ends with one hell of a final twist—my favorite Flanagan kicker to date.

2. The Fall of the House of Usher

Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher opens in much the same way as the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name: A man arrives at a decrepit home, summoned by an old acquaintance who is deathly ill. But from there, the series expands in directions both typical and wildly unexpected. Like Flanagan’s other adaptations, it riffs on plots and motifs from the author’s most famous works—“The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

Yet House of Usher also dares to bring Poe into the most contemporary of contexts, reimagining the unfortunate Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) as the patriarch of an opioid empire in the mold of the Sacklers’ Purdue Pharma . A series of what appear to be tragic coincidences has just befallen the family: Roderick’s six adult children (by five different mothers) have all died, gorily, one after the other. Now afflicted with nightmarish delusions, he has promised a confession to the attorney, Carl Lumbly’s C. Auguste Dupin, who has spent decades laboring to catch the Ushers, whose drugs have killed hundreds of thousands, engaged in illegal activities.

It’s quite a long story. Weaving together the past—Roderick and his beloved twin sister Madeline’s (Mary McDonnell) unhappy 1950s childhood, then his rise to power as a young father (Zach Gilford) on the cusp of the ’80s—and the present, it recounts each heir’s untimely demise. A spectral, shapeshifting character played by Gugino appears to each of the Ushers in turn. While the setting is ultra-modern, the atmosphere is archetypally Gothic. Shadows loom. Ravens hover. Psyches suffer. Generous excerpts of Poe’s most morbid texts are recited.

House of Usher is, however, anything but a bummer. More propulsive than any other series in Flanagan’s slow-burning canon, it can also be quite funny. Roderick’s magnificently named children, from aspiring nightlife impresario Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) to Kate Siegel’s dagger-tongued PR czar Camille, are hilariously, debaucherously awful. Often, the show feels like a broader, spookier riff on Succession . (In fact, Roderick’s two eldest offspring have more than a little in common with Kendall and Shiv Roy.) If the script gets a bit preachy in the end, well, House of Usher still brings more insight into the evils of supply and demand to its depiction of pharmaceutical profiteers than the many straightforward docudramas that preceded it.

1. Midnight Mass

It’s a testament to Flanagan’s abilities as a storyteller that the very best of the five Netflix series he’s created is also the only one that came straight out of his imagination. Gilford stars as Riley Flynn, a prodigal son who returns from Chicago to the tiny island community where he grew up, now a recovering alcoholic haunted by the teen girl he killed in a drunk-driving accident. Crockett Island is a religious place, but Riley—once an altar boy—has lost his faith. Thankfully, or not, there’s also an enthusiastic new priest in town: Father Paul Hill, portrayed in a gloriously unhinged performance by Hamish Linklater. Miracles start to happen. But religious fervor of the kind Father Paul awakens rarely leads to happy outcomes; Crockett descends into chaos.

Midnight Mass delivers some of the biggest, craziest, most delightfully bizarre set pieces in the Flanagan oeuvre. Two years after it debuted, there are bonkers plot twists that I’m still avoiding here because I don’t want to spoil anyone’s surprise. But these moments are only a small part of what makes the series his masterpiece. Religious anxiety—as it afflicts true believers, non-believers, and hypocrites—is a common theme but one that’s hard to execute without defaulting to cliché. Flanagan uses the outsize imagery of horror to explore different flavors of faith and doubt with nuance. Neither vindicating nor condemning the devout, he suggests that unquestioned fealty to whichever god one worships might be the most dangerous thing of all. 

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Horror fans say terrifying Netflix scene is the ‘most effective jump scare ever seen’

It’s spooky season, and your mum is more than likely having a silent competition with the neighbours to decorate her front windows to bring in the most trick or treaters.

All the girlies are buying pumpkins to put on their uni house’s fireplace and Netflix is filling our suggested sections with horror movies.

And actually, it’s not even just horror films anymore, but series too.

Falling swiftly into that category is the very popular The Haunting of Hill House.

The 2018 series is still raved about to this day and horror fans love to binge their way through the episodes – especially at this time of year.

Created by Mike Flanagan , the series features Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Kate Siegel and Henry Thomas.

The Netflix synopsis reads: “ The Haunting of Hill House is a modern reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s legendary novel of the same name, about five siblings who grew up in the most famous haunted house in America.

“Now adults, they’re reunited by the suicide of their youngest sister, which forces them to finally confront the ghosts of their own pasts… some which lurk in their minds... and some which may really be lurking in the shadows of the iconic Hill House.”

While the series is pretty much loved by horror fans in general, there’s one particular scene being chatted about it.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, but in episode eight of The Haunting of Hill House there’s a scene with the backseat of a car proving to have ‘the most effective jump scare’.

Users on Reddit said: “That episode scared the hell out of me. The way they show how the bent neck lady came to be blew my mind, it was so well executed.”

Another put: “I had trouble sleeping that night the first time I saw it.”

One also wrote: “It was completely 100% unexpected. Goes against the grain of the usual jumpscare after a quiet and tense scene.”

And others said: “The weird thing is that it still gets me. I’ve watched this show three or four times now, including a run through a few months ago, and it still nearly gave me a heart attack.

“And I don’t actually react to jump scares 98% of the time. That’s how effective that scene.”

Flanagan of course followed up The Haunting of Hill House with The Haunting of Bly Manor in 2020 and recently, The Fall of the House of Usher – which is proving to be just as popular.

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Every Terrifying Mike Flanagan Show, Ranked from Worst to Best

The acclaimed horror writer has an impressive list of spooky shows.

Flanagan has shown through the years that he’s not afraid to go to oft-treaded horror waters: his Netflix projects don’t shy away from jump scares, they don’t worry about anything being too violent, or too shocking, and they aren’t afraid of playing into tropes that people have seen before. But what Flanagan does to make all this worth every horror fan’s time is put a signature stamp of passion and care into every shot. If there’s a jump scare, it’s there with purpose. If someone gets brutally killed , well, they probably deserved it (or, at least, it’s serving something that will surely pay off later). When there’s a shock, it comes with meaning.

And that’s not to mention Flanagan’s skill at creating characters who simply pop off the screen. We’re watching shows that are meant to scare us, but part of the reason that they work so well is that the characters at their core feel like real people. Whether they’re as flawed and human as the family at the center of The Haunting of Hill House or as morally bankrupt as the one in The Fall of the House of Usher, it’s abundantly clear that no shortcuts were taken. These are characters who, for better or for worse, represent the best, or the worst, of humanity. That’s vital for a good horror story.

After five shows with Netflix— The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher —Flanagan is off to work with Prime Video ; he signed an overall deal last year, jumping from one streamer to another. We don’t know what’s coming next (he’s already got a new movie with Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill in the works, along with a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series ; both projects are separate from his overall deal ), but we know it’ll be scary and humane in all the best ways.

To celebrate what feels like the end of one horror era (and likely the early beginning of another), we decided to rank the best of Flanagan’s grisly, humane, Netflix horror shows.

Midnight Club (2022)

Despite its promising premise oriented to teens looking for a thrilling scare, Midnight Club didn't deliver the same scares as the earlier Flanagan series. The show lacked the talent of Flanagan's usual ensemble cast, and the overarching plot failed to compel in comparison to the individual scary stories each character told. Despite this low ranking, however, it's possible Midnight Club could have built upon itself in a second season, which it unfortunately never received. That being said, it was still a fun, spooky time, and we as horror fans will always be happy to see Heather Langenkamp back in the genre—where any Nightmare on Elm Street fan knows she belongs. ~ MP

The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)

For the second installment of his The Haunting franchise, Flanagan looked to the work of Henry James and The Turn of the Screw. Bringing back many of his old cast friends (and marking his first collab with future mainstay Rahul Kohli ), Bly Manor largely traded in the jump scares and family trauma of Hill House for a story that, essentially, was a gothic romance about self-destruction. It was a thrilling haunted house story, and, like anything else on this list, could rank higher depending on which way the wind blows. This is a fantastic horror series. —ER

Stream it Here

The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

The perfect Netflix send-off for Flanagan, The Fall of the House of Usher dials in on what makes his horror miniseries so great: his skill in reimagining classic literature for a contemporary audience. Featuring almost all of his usual cast collaborators, House of Usher grips you with its Succession -like family and frightens you with Edgar Allan Poe- inspired scares for a thrilling 8 episodes. And with an ending that , essentially, ties everything together... there's not much horror TV better. ~ MP

The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

His first show for Netflix, Flanagan's Hill House still takes the cake as arguably the most arresting series he's released. Featuring a strong ensemble cast and shocking jump scares, the show delivers on all its promises of spooky family trauma and terrifying death, while showing viewers (for the long haul) that this is also a writer who can infuse some seriously deep stuff within his grisly horror. Seriously, once you see the Bent-Neck lady, you'll want to sleep with the lights on—and think about the meaning of life right after. ~ MP

Midnight Mass (2021)

While Flanagan has shown an utter talent for adapting classic horror literature and updating it (look no further than above the list, where he makes great writing into great TV in every other entry), it's his Netflix series with an original screenplay that tops our list. Midnight Mass is Flanagan at his very, very best; stunningly shot and brilliantly written—with dread that builds with every episode and a central mystery that you can't look away from—this is the best show he ever made. And along with that brilliant writing comes some truly arresting performances; it's a crime that Hamish Linklater wasn't nominated for an Emmy for his role as Father Paul . Flanagan wrote this story from scratch, but think of it as if he was making his version of Stephen King 's Salem's Lot —and infusing it with the catholic guilt and reckoning of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. It rules. —ER

Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.

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‘the fall of the house of usher’ dethroned in netflix’s top 10 list by a new show.

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The Fall of the House of Usher

Netflix picked the perfect spooky month to debut Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, his swan song as he moves on from projects like this, The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass to go work at Amazon. Probably to make a Dark Tower series.

The Fall of the House of Usher stayed on top of Netflix’s top 10 chart for well over a week, and now has only been unseated today by a new, different sort of mystery show, Bodies, which has come out of relative nowhere to debut at #2 and now make it to #1.

Bodies is a science fiction show about a corpse that shows up at three distinct points in history in the same spot. The same corpse. That’s the central mystery and the show focuses on aspects of time travel that has drawn many comparisons to Netflix’s Dark, one of its best-ever series. This is not the same team, and the show is indeed in English. It stars very, very few people you’d recognize. I know the guy who played Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire but that’s about it. I’ve only just started it, but it’s scoring decently well, and I’m curious enough to make it through the whole thing.

A new season of Big Mouth is here and at #3, now its seventh season as the show is massive sleeper hit for Netflix that feels like it will keep going forever. At #4 is “I Woke Up a Vampire,” a goofy Halloween-ish series for the younger crowd that I’m guessing probably could have been a movie.

Neon is a new music-based show that has debuted at #5. The Great British Baking Show, Beckham and Pact of Silence are older list entries that are sliding down. At the tail end of the list we have “Surviving Paradise,” a reality show where players fight to move from the wilderness to a luxury villa as Netflix tries to make its own Survivor, I guess. The last show is “Creature,” a Turkish series about a monster that I assume is not Frankenstein.

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There’s really not much of anything to discuss here about renewals or shows desperate for more seasons. Bodies is a limited series. House of Usher is too and Flanagan is leaving. Big Mouth will live forever. I suppose I Woke Up a Vampire may want another season, but we probably wouldn’t see that until next Halloween. It does not have particularly good audience scores so I’m not sure how much hope it has unless viewership really skyrockets.

For now, I’m going to work on finishing Netflix’s Bodies and I will let you know what I think soon.

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‘She exposed the fragility of so-called civilised life’: why Shirley Jackson’s horror speaks to our times

With their visions of violence and misogyny in small-town America, the Haunting of Hill House author’s chilling tales are taking on a dark new resonance

I first encountered Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery in fourth grade at an elementary school in a small north-eastern American town not unlike the one where the tale is set. Our teacher, Miss Halloran, liked to give us challenging reading material, so I can only assume she knew what she was doing when she had us read Jackson’s story aloud, each student taking a turn as the tale progressed from its folksy beginning to its shattering conclusion. Glancing up from the page, I saw the expressions of my classmates change, from mild boredom to confusion to shock to outright horror when someone read the tale’s final lines: “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”

Published in the New Yorker in June 1948, The Lottery depicts the residents of an “ordinary” small American town indulging in an annual ritual orgy of violence. Each year, one of the villagers, chosen by lot, is stoned to death by neighbours and family. Our class read it in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love, and also of cultural and social upheavals we were barely aware of. Was Miss Halloran trying to teach us about moral culpability, the dangers of conformity, the threat of violence that was soon to erupt in riots across the country?

I have no clue. All I knew was that I wanted more Shirley Jackson. I read The Haunting of Hill House next, and then The Bird’s Nest and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and some years later Hangsaman and The Sundial, along with her short fiction. I’ve reread her work over the decades, continually amazed by Jackson’s ability to unsettle, provoke and elicit sympathy for characters who are often unabashedly unpleasant, in prose spare and sharp as a boning knife.

She grew up in California, the only child of conservative country club parents. Throughout her life, Jackson’s mother never stopped harping on about her daughter’s appearance – her clothing, her hair, her weight. Jackson unsurprisingly chose to attend Syracuse University, 5,000km away, where she met her future husband, the critic and college professor Stanley Edgar Hyman. They married and moved to North Bennington, Vermont, the picturesque, insular New England village that inspired the settings of some of her most enduring work.

Hyman taught at Bennington College, then a haven for privileged young women; Jackson spent much of her adult life on its outskirts. There she raised four children, immortalised in her bestselling nonfiction collections Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, precursors to the domestic humour popularised by Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Nora Ephron and numerous contemporary blogs and influencers.

During her too-short life – she died in 1965 at the age of 48 – Jackson produced six novels, a collection of short fiction, three book-length works of nonfiction and several children’s books, along with myriad stories for women’s magazines. Her most memorable work shows women in the process of disintegration, often through the lens of trauma, emphasising how their desires – for love, sexual union, knowledge, creative freedom – curdle into despair and terror under the relentless, venomous drip of sexism and misogyny.

In The Lottery, that disintegration is literal. More often Jackson details a psychological rupture. Natalie, the 17-year-old protagonist of her second novel, Hangsaman (published the same year as The Lottery), is raped on the eve of her departure for a nearby college (an obvious stand-in for Bennington). The novel traps the reader in Natalie’s subsequent dissociation from campus life, culminating in a nightmarish visit to an abandoned amusement park, where she contemplates suicide. In one extraordinary scene, she envisions herself as a giantess attacking her housemates, dismantling the college dorm “while the mannikins inside run screaming … I shall eat the room in one mouthful, chewing ruthlessly on the boards and small sweet bones.”

Jackson’s most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, puts a nihilist, supernatural spin on similar material. Its protagonist, the socially awkward 32-year-old Eleanor Vance, has spent 11 years caring for her spiteful invalid mother. As a girl, Eleanor caused an outbreak of poltergeist activity – for three days, stones fell on her family’s house as crowds gathered to witness the destruction. After her mother dies, Eleanor is invited to take part in a paranormal investigation, headed by Dr John Montague. He summons her and three others to Hill House, an adventure she undertakes with delighted anticipation.

But it soon becomes clear that, with Hill House, she has traded one grimly dysfunctional relationship for a far more dangerous one. In a reversal of house-sized Natalie devouring her dormitory and its residents, Hill House proceeds to engulf Eleanor’s psyche. The book can be read as a record of mental illness as much as a ghost story, especially in the terrifying climactic scene where Eleanor drives her car wildly down the mansion’s driveway, her final thoughts an aria of desperate disbelief: “ Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don’t they stop me?”.

Houses aren’t safe spaces in Jackson’s fiction. They are stages for disruption, mirroring both their protagonists’ vulnerability and their worst impulses. In Jackson’s last and greatest novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the two Blackwood sisters have barricaded themselves in their decaying mansion, feared and reviled by those in the neighbouring village (North Bennington again). Six years earlier the younger sister, Merricat, poisoned the other members of their family, apparently for being sent to her room without supper. Her older sister, Constance, took the rap but was acquitted. Now 18, Merricat lives with her and their doddering Uncle Julian, sole survivor of the mass murder.

Preternaturally serene, Constance compulsively cleans and cooks, stores preserves and clucks over Uncle Julian. Meanwhile, Merricat endures the taunts of village children whenever she ventures out to get groceries. Accompanied by her cat, she spends her days setting protective spells around the overgrown estate, burying coins and nailing books to trees. Occasionally she has savage fits, smashing dishes and glassware that Constance calmly cleans up.

The arrival of their cousin Charles threatens this peculiar idyll. Constance finds herself tempted to leave their mansion, but Merricat correctly sees Charles as an opportunist intent on the Blackwood fortune. Rather than surrender her sister and their home to the outside world, she sets a fire that destroys the upper floors. What happens to the Blackwood home next, at the hands of the fire department and villagers, magnifies the compressed violence of The Lottery.

Like Hill House, Castle was a commercial and critical success, nominated for a National Book award. Today, more than a half century later, her fiction is having a resurgence. The recent Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House was widely acclaimed and there are more screen adaptations in the works, including a film of The Lottery. You can see Jackson’s influence on writers such as Silvia Moreno Garcia and Carmen Maria Machado, and in films including The Babadook and Midsommar.

Jackson’s work has a particularly disturbing resonance today, when our experience of the pandemic and reports of rioters rampaging through the US Capitol and erecting gallows outside are still fresh in the memory. Small–town meetings are routinely interrupted by people spewing hate speech, and rightwing politicians work tirelessly to dismantle women’s rights, setting the clock back 75 years, to when The Lottery first appeared. Yet although Jackson acknowledges issues of abuse and female disempowerment, the ostensible victims in her tales often in the end gain the upper hand, or at least a new mode of survival.

Throughout her career, Jackson fixed a dispassionate, basilisk gaze on men and women alike, shattering the carapace of respectability that hides our darkest drives. She exposed the fragility of so-called civilised life, how swiftly ordinary people can brutally turn against their own family, friends and neighbours. Pierce the skin of any one of us, she suggests, and what oozes out isn’t blood, but venom.

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His House is the scariest movie on Netflix right now. Here’s why you should watch it

It’s the Halloween season, and fans are looking for the best horror movies on Netflix . While there are some great horror flicks on Netflix , like Get Out , we want to narrow things down to the scariest movie on Netflix. Our pick is a little known film called His House , from first-time director Remi Weekes.

It has a new spin on the haunted house story

Wunmi mosaku and sope dirisu give compelling performances, the horrors of war.

Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku star as a married couple, Bol and Rial, who have escaped the war in their native Sudan to find refuge in the U.K. Unfortunately, the couple’s new lives aren’t all they hoped for, and something evil has followed them into their home. It’s a haunting experience that feels like a breath of fresh air for the genre. It’s not a typical jump-scare horror movie, and some of its horrors are all too real.

If you need more convincing, here are three reasons why His House is the scariest movie on Netflix right now.

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Typical haunted house stories are about great mansions or manors, which have plenty of rooms for ghosts and spirits to inhabit. Conversely, in this film, Bol and Rial aren’t exactly living in luxury. As refugees, they’ve been placed in an extremely rundown tenement that looks like it’s falling apart. In such small confines, there’s really nowhere to run when the couple’s supernatural haunting begins.

When Bol becomes convinced that an apeth (an evil spirit or night witch) is living in the walls, he starts tearing into the walls themselves. This further underscores how little space that they to work with, as well as their desperate need to get the apeth out of their lives.

The haunting is only part of this story. Dirisu and Mosaku performances are so good that this could have been a great drama even without the touch of the supernatural. From the very start, the couple appear to understand that their status as refugees is tenuous at best. Even their caseworker, Mark ( Doctor Who ‘s Matt Smith), seems to have barely disguised disdain for them.

In response, Bol does everything he can to fit in with his new country and assimilate to their new culture. On the other hand, Rial refuses to change who she is or abandon their customs. She also adamantly holds on to the necklace of their daughter, Nyagak (Malaika Abigaba), who perished on their perilous journey. The relationship between the couple is strained to its breaking point by both the haunting and by the dark secret they share about how they survived. Those moments of real drama do a lot to elevate the horror around them.

Late in the film, His House has an extended sequence in Sudan that reveals exactly what Bol and Rial did to survive, and how they earned the wrath of the apeth. The bloodshed and violence the couple lived through is perhaps even more horrific than the horror in the present. It also allows the audience to understand why Bol and Rial committed a crime of their own just to escape. But the film doesn’t excuse their actions either.

The war sequences are some of the most impressive parts of the movie, and may be where most of the budget went. His House took a big swing by venturing into territory where few horror films have gone before. That may be the biggest reason why this movie seems destined to be a cult favorite when it gets discovered by a wider audience.

Watch His House on Netflix .

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The notion of making a sequel to The Shining, one of the most important horror movies ever made, would strike many as foolhardy, to say the least. Doctor Sleep, Mike Flanagan's 2019 attempt to do exactly that, has to serve so many different masters that it seems like it would be doomed to failure. It's an adaptation of Stephen King's sequel to The Shining, but it also has to honor Stanley Kubrick's film, which has almost nothing to do with the book it's based on. Somehow, though, Flanagan managed to make a movie that doesn't just work but is downright great as well.

Following Danny Torrance as an adult struggling to understand the trauma of his childhood, the movie is now streaming on Hulu, and it's the perfect scary movie to check out this October. Here are three reasons why: It never tries to be The Shining

The season for frights and spooky entertainment is upon us. And there's no better time to cue up a steady stream of horror films and shows than the month of October. The looming specter of Halloween aside, any reason is a good reason to fit some quality scares into your schedule. Though there are plenty of horror films to choose from, director James Wan's Malignant should absolutely be on your radar as the film hits Hulu's library in October.

Malignant joins a long line of horror films that pique our curiosity and stick like glue to our memory banks thanks in part to bold and evocative single-word titles like Insidious, Sinister, Smile, Terrifier, It, etc. With a master of horror at its helm and eerie cover art to boot, the film should look promising to the average horror fan. Rest assured, Malignant is unreservedly worthy of your attention. James Wan is a modern master of horror

It's Taylor Swift's world, we're just living in it. This weekend, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is poised for a superhero-worthy box-office performance that will put all other concert movies to shame. Swift is at the peak of her popularity and is one of the few artists who could pull this off in the modern era. But even Swift had to start from scratch, as seen in Netflix's 2020 documentary, Taylor Swift: Miss Americana.

Miss Americana was very popular at the time of its release, in part because it offered fans a glimpse at Swift's real persona in a way that they had never seen her before. Prior to that, Swift had withheld many of the details about her personal life and simply focused on her music and performances. In retrospect, Miss Americana may have helped Swift reach even greater heights simply by letting people into her personal orbit through watching the film.  So whether you're a new Swiftie or a veteran fan who wants to revisit this film, here are three reasons why you should watch Taylor Swift: Miss Americana. It celebrates Taylor Swift's musical journey

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8 shows to watch next if you loved Netflix's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

• Mike Flanagan's latest show, "The Fall of the House of Usher," recently arrived on Netflix. 
• The show is based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and follows the downfall of a corrupt family.
• Here are eight other shows you should watch if you liked the new horror series.

1. "Revenge" (2011)

If you're looking for more backstabbing families, drama, and intrigue, then ABC's "Revenge" is the perfect follow-up to "The Fall of the House of Usher."

"Revenge" premiered back in 2012 and stars Emily VanCamp as Emily Thorne, a woman who starts renting out a house in the Hamptons with the sole purpose of tearing down the people who betrayed her father and had him thrown in prison. 

While "Revenge" isn't scary, the masterfully intense drama and plot twists kept audiences hooked for four seasons until the series came to a close in 2015. That's not to mention the brilliant supporting cast, including Madeleine Stowe, Henry Czerny and Gabriel Mann.

Stream "Revenge" on Hulu .

2. "Hannibal" (2013)

Obviously, Anthony Hopkins made Hannibal Lecter into one of the most iconic villains in cinema thanks to his performances in "Silence of the Lambs," "Red Dragon," and "Hannibal." But Mads Mikkelsen added new dimensions to the character in NBC's "Hannibal" TV series .

The show starts with looking at how criminal profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and the titular cannibal first crossed paths, but later adapts the books that the films were based on. 

As the pair tackle numerous twisted serial killers, Bryan Fuller depicts all the violence and gore using a gorgeously depraved visual style that stands head and shoulders above other crime dramas. 

Not only that, but the stunning performances from Mikkelsen and Dancy force audiences to look at these characters with a truly unique perspective that the films never had. It's a crime that NBC canceled the show after season three, but at least it has a beautiful, bittersweet ending.

Stream "Hannibal" on Hulu .

3. "The Following" (2013)

"The Following" is an underrated series about Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), a serial killer who is inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

At the start of the series, he escapes from prison with help from a cult of equally disturbed followers that he has recruited, so that they can carry out a campaign of murder across the US.

Kevin Bacon leads the series as Ryan Hardy, the FBI agent tasked with stopping Carroll after he escapes from prison. 

The show is slasher-horror crossed with a police procedural, and the result is surprisingly effective. Like "The Fall of the House of Usher," it also approaches Poe's work from twisted new angles, as Carroll aims to complete the writer's unfinished work "The Light-House" through his murderous plan.

Rent or purchase "The Following" on Prime Video .

4. "Penny Dreadful" (2014)

Remember when Universal Pictures tried to do a monster cinematic universe in 2017 after Tom Cruise's "The Mummy" and it never actually happened? Well, Showtime and Sky actually did a version of that on the small screen back in 2014 with "Penny Dreadful."

The supernatural drama imagines a world where the Wolfman, Dorian Gray , Van Helsing, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, and Count Dracula all co-exist.

It takes place in London during the late 1800s, and follows Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), and Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) as they try to stop Lucifer from bringing about the apocalypse.

Not only is it cool seeing all the various horror characters come together, but the writers do a great job of creating a genuinely captivating story amongst the intense atmosphere. It's not quite as jumpy as Flanagan's shows, but it's still pretty creepy.

Stream "Penny Dreadful" on Showtime . 

5. "Succession" (2018)

Okay, "Succession" is a little different to Mike Flanagan 's gory horror drama, but it's not too dissimilar from "The Fall of the House of Usher." After all, it follows the family behind a massively successful (and lucrative) company and all the misdeeds that they've done as a result of their power.

The HBO series follows the Roy siblings as they all try to scramble to become the new CEO after their fiery father, Logan Roy (Brian Cox) , announces his retirement. 

"Succession" walks the fine line between satire and parody of real-world people and events with a razor-sharp script and top notch performances from stars like Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Matthew Macfadyen, and Rory Culkin.

Stream "Succession" on Max .

6. "Castle Rock" (2018)

The short-lived Hulu series "Castle Rock" takes place in the fictional town of the same name created by Stephen King , and it blends elements from several of the horror author's most famous books together into a TV series.

Season one starts with the discovery of "the Kid" ( Bill Skarsgård ), who had been locked in a cage underneath Shawshank prison for 27 years. It also features Jackie Torrance (Jane Levy), the niece of "The Shining" villain, Jack Torrance .

Season two introduces a young Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan) from "Misery," while also adapting King's 1975 book "Salem's Lot" in a big way.

It's not perfect — and the mind-bending reveals of season one might be a little confusing — but the ambitious scale of "Castle Rock" will definitely strike a chord with fans of Flanagan's work.

Stream "Castle Rock" on Hulu .

7. "The Haunting of Hill House" (2018)

Mike Flanagan's most famous project, "The Haunting of Hill House," is an absolute must-watch for any horror fan who hasn't already seen it. Not only is it heart-stoppingly scary, but there's an incredibly emotional storyline underneath all the creepy ghouls .

The mystery shifts between two timelines — one set in the 1990s, and one following the present day — as the children of the Crain family try to figure out why the supernatural horrors they faced at Hill House as kids are starting to haunt them again as adults.

The cast are all at the top of their game, but "You" star Victoria Pedretti is a force of (super)nature. Her role as Nell is utterly heartbreaking, and Flanagan twists the knife even further in the finale.

This is all without mentioning the countless ghosts and jump scares that are crammed into the series, making it a pulse-pounding experience. It is superb.

Stream "The Haunting of Hill House" on Netflix .

8. "Midnight Mass" (2021)

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is far from Flanagan's only collaboration with Netflix. But the 2021 series "Midnight Mass" might be his most underrated gem on the streamer.

It takes place on the secluded community of Crockett Island, as their new priest Father Hill (Hamish Linklater) seemingly starts performing miracles for his congregation.

Obviously, if something is too good to be true, it usually is. And once the truth about the priest is revealed, the whole island is turned on its head. 

This series is more of a slow-burn compared to "The Fall of the House of Usher," but it has no problem showing its fangs when it wants to scare audiences. The final episode is nothing short of heartbreaking and jaw-dropping all at once.

Stream "Midnight Mass" on Netflix .

Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.

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