We were going to open several episodes of the show with this kind of history, split out over the whole season, which would show you the construction of Hill House, the history of the Hill family, who everybody was”, but then because of filming schedules it was eventually scrapped. In an interview Mike Flanagan says that “we had a whole history of Hill House that we were going to shoot. We would have got to see all of this play out, but in a cruel twist of fate those episodes got cut. That festering hate built and built between the two over the years, and it sounds like that’s what made Hill House evil. the ghost in the bowler hat that follows Luke) dies, the two women had nowhere else to go, grew old, and died in that house together. Then after Poppy’s husband, William Hill (i.e. Other stories from Count to Seven recount the bitter feud between Poppy Hill and Hazel Hill, and their war for control got so intense that the inhabitants of the nearby village think they murdered each other’s children. He committed suicide by throwing himself off of the roof during the Great Depression, and that sounds like it created the evil that infested Hill House. Judging from its architecture it looks like it was built in the Gothic Revival style, which would put its construction at about 1830 - 1860, and according to the stories from Count To Seven on Reddit (who is officially linked to the show as writer) it was built by Hazel Hill’s father, Jacob Hill. Is The Haunting of Hill House ending really that happy? Hugh, for example, sees Olivia’s ghost beside him at all times, but that turns out just to be one of his coping mechanisms as when he meets the real ghost of Olivia in Hill House, she tells him that version of her was all in his head. These kinds of ghosts are warnings, representing fear, or guilt, or a painful memory, and it’s ambiguous whether they’re the result of Hill House’s influence on the Crains or whether they’re hallucinations springing from someone’s fragile mental state. Luke isn’t dead either - though he sure comes close for a while - yet Nell and Olivia both see him foaming from the mouth as a premonition of his near-death encounter at Hill House. So the man in the bar who keeps appearing to Shirley reminds her of when she slept with him at her mortuary conference (ew) yet he isn’t dead, instead being a representation of her guilt. Although they mostly are undead, outside of Hill House ghosts can be the embodiment of someone’s guilt, regrets, or trauma. You can see William in one of the photos Mrs Dudley finds in Nell’s Toy Room standing next to his daughter, complete with bowler hat, moustache, and cane. After Luke steals his bowler hat, William haunts Luke for the rest of his life. He’s the one who goes floating from room to room looking for his bowler hat after Luke found it in the house as a child. After being driven even more insane by the House, he bricked himself up in a wall in the ‘40s and Hugh discovered his skeleton while trying to rid the house of black mould - and sure enough, William brought his cane into the wall with him. As a child his parents sent him to “boarding school”, which was actually a mental asylum where he met, fell in love with, and married Poppy. That fellow is Poppy Hill’s medically-insane husband William Hill, otherwise known as the creepily tall man (during life his height was always an obsession of his according to Poppy). In hindsight the Red Room’s ever-changing nature explains Mrs Dudley’s confusion when Nell and Steven mention the toy and game room to her, as despite having worked in Hill House for years she had never encountered those rooms. Notice how Hugh very rarely saw ghosts? He’s the only character who didn’t have his own version of the Red Room, suggesting that he couldn’t see ghosts thanks to the House’s inability to get inside his head precisely because he didn’t have a room of his own to be “digested in”. So for Shirley the Red Room is a family room, for Theo it’s a dance studio, for Steven it’s a game room, a treehouse for Luke, a reading room for Olivia, and a toy room for Nell where she found her cup of stars. That leaves them susceptible to the influence of the ghosts roaming the hallways. No wonder it stayed shut - the room is something different each time it opens depending on who wants to get in, disguising itself as a different room to - get this - “digest” whoever is inside.ĭigesting the family takes the form of getting inside their head and slowly brainwashing them, like what happened to Olivia Crain. Over the course of the Crains’ stay in the dark mansion, the Red Room remained stubbornly closed despite Hugh Crain taking a hammer and chisel to the door frame. In the last episode, Nell’s ghost reveals that the Red Room is the “stomach” of Hill House.
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