The Haunting of Hill House

The Crain family once lived in a house they intended to renovate. Years later, their different accounts of that experience still shape the way they deal with one another. The Haunting of Hill House moves between those children and the adults they become.

Mike Flanagan makes the family relationships carry the horror. An argument can be troubling before anything supernatural happens, because the participants have spent years protecting themselves in incompatible ways. The movement between periods gradually changes the meaning of scenes without requiring the viewer to be told every connection.

There are scares, but the continuing pull is the sense that the family never really left the house behind. Best watched without knowing its revelations in advance. The Haunting of Bly Manor uses another household for a separate, more overtly romantic ghost story.