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When Hugh first enters the funeral parlor, he sees his children as they were at Hill House - as children. She was there the whole time, she says, waving and screaming and trying to get their attention, but none of them could see her. Finally, when the storm ends and the lights go on, there’s Nell, shivering and sobbing. The family searches the house for her, to no avail. In another take on the “Whose hand was I holding?” scene, Nell vanishes while Theo believes she’s holding tight to her hand. This episode also introduces a more disturbing form of slippage that takes place in the house, almost like the parallel universe in Stranger Things.
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There’s no need to journey back - they’re already there. (For a moment, he and his younger self are in the same frame.) It’s perfect because the past is present in these characters’ daily lives in such an extreme way. Here, Hugh turns a corner in the funeral parlor and finds himself in the Hill House hallway. In an earlier episode, Theo picks up an apple in the present and bites into it back in Hill House. And in a line borrowed from Doctor Who, in episode two Olivia says, “We’re all stories in the end.” Much of what takes place in this episode is the Crains exchanging stories about Nell - the letters to Santa in which she asked for gifts for her siblings rather than herself her made-up words and mispronunciations, such as “indivisible” instead of “invisible.” Of course, the siblings once were indivisible, until they weren’t anymore.īut what no one comments on explicitly is the slippage between past and present that’s one of the show’s central tropes, reinforced subconsciously by the exquisite editing that allows scenes to fade seamlessly into each other. Hugh tells Nell that the visions she sees are her dreams overflowing their boundaries and spilling into reality. We imagine we see ghosts, he says, because that’s more consoling than the idea that our loved ones are gone forever.
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To Steve, who’s been getting rich off writing ghost stories while claiming not to believe in them himself, they’re memories, daydreams, or the representations of emotions like grief or anger. So far, we’ve heard a number of different theories about ghosts. “But they’re not here to hurt us.” Thanks, Mom! “Sometimes Mommy sees people here too,” she tells Nell - perhaps the least reassuring thing possible to say. After Olivia’s encounter with the boy, she enters what might be a fugue state, drifting through the halls apparently unaware of her surroundings or time passing. Not only have we not seen the last of the bent-neck lady (although we’re seeing her in a different incarnation), we meet two new residents of Hill House: a boy in an old-fashioned wheelchair and an old lady who might be his grandmother, sitting up in the bed that freaked Theo out in episode three. That’s not to say that there are no ghosts - to the contrary. The one thing that unites them, aside from their love for Nell, is their rage at their father and their desire to finally get the truth out of him about their mother’s death. Steve makes lame jokes, Luke freaks out, Theo gets drunk, and Shirley acts self-righteous. Reunited with each other - and their estranged father - for Nell’s funeral, the siblings squabble among themselves and misbehave. “We’re just like any other family,” Steve told Nell in the last episode, and there’s more evidence for that here than in any other episode to this point. Nearly all of it takes place in the present, in the relatively mundane confines of the Harris Funeral Home, and the skeletons that come out of the closet are the usual kind - the old griefs and grievances, petty or otherwise, that can poison the atmosphere of any family reunion. Episode one has four episode three, nine.Įpisode six has zero. On the Haunting of Hill House Twitter feed GIFs are posted showing the “ hidden ghost tally” for each episode - those faces flickering in a mirror or a corner of the screen that you’re not quite sure you saw.