The Haunting of Hill House: So Far a Winner For Hutton

Spoiler Alert: This review may contain spoilers.

Just great.

Timothy Hutton is surely rehabilitating his acting career, in Haunting of Hill House, by becoming the despondent and flighty father of a group of traumatized children that were attacked by a schizophrenic time-warping domicile. 

In this common plot of horror, it took quite a few episodes for the older Hutton to appear, and all his adult children- you do not know -have uncanny abilities to see ghosts or are just delusional in the here and now. When these appearances occur, one is left with a sense of foreboding from one’s past. And that inevitably leads back to their childhood and that one dastardly house of smoke and mirrors.

But alas, the father returns after one of his brood dies in that same house of antiquity, she combatting her own demons of psychotropic withdrawal and suicide. The funeral ties many unknowns together, and the weary children beg for answers he has always evaded about the matriarch’s death twenty-some years prior.

Now, the twin of the deceased, an errant wildcard, slips away from the day’s funeral events, steals a sibling’s Jeep and another’s credit card, and treks to his youthful abode for fiery vengeance. Ah, now the father cracks his own ice block with the calipers of forgiveness and warns the eldest of his flock en route to save the youngest- they are not and never were delusions or mental illness; the house molds and consumes all that enters and stays beyond sundown.

Who’s next out of his beleaguered clan? Can Hutton pull off this feat and be immortalized in the annals of Hollywood celluloid? Or is this another Greek tragedy, where directors dare not trust the aging brat packer of Americana?

One may not know for sure, the bell knell and “Taps” not heard as of yet. Stay tuned as only two episodes remain in Season 1. Soon, we’ll know for certain if Netflix truly loathes our youthful heroes of yester-year or they are just bemused with more culture obliteration. Either way, Tim’s rendition is not bad at all. Not bad at all.

P. Francis Mcnichol has authored two published horror novels through the vanities. His third mega biblion of horror novellas and poetry sits in escrow awaiting review and purchase; it is 500 pages of tastefully-eerie ghost plots and tragedy. He has been published in Muscle Development, the August, 2003 edition, exposing bodybuilding scams. And from his peace officer background, thousands of handwritten reports by him was practice for over a decade prior.