Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the Netflix original series The Haunting of Hill House, a modern reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name. After nine episodes of suspense, the finale of The Haunting of Hill House finally revealed the spine-chilling truth about the so-called Red Room. But the mystery behind the door at the top of the spiral staircase is likely not what you were expecting. The Red Room was introduced in the show’s first episode during a flashback sequence in which young Shirley (Lulu Wilson) and Nell (Violet McGraw) tried and failed to open the door using a master key given to them by Mr. Dudley (Robert Longstreet). Shirley told Nell that the door had been locked for years, but after they walked away, it was clear there was someone—or something—standing just on the other side of it. Fast-forward to the opening sequence of the finale, which at first seemed as though it was a repeat of the same scene. But then we get the revelation that it was actually Theo (McKenna Grace), who thought she was in her dance studio, on the other side all along. An earlier episode also showed the scene from Theo’s perspective. But the twist wasn’t fully explained until all of the adult Crain siblings, including the ghost of Nell (Victoria Pedretti), were trapped in the Red Room later in the finale. “We have been in this room, so many times and we didn’t know. All of us,” Nell told her brothers and sisters. “Mom says that a house is like a body and that every house has eyes and bones and skin and a face. This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart, a stomach. It was your dance studio, Theo. It was my toy room. It was a reading room for mom, a game room for Steve, a family room for Shirley, a tree house. But it was always the Red Room. It put on different faces so that we’d be still and quiet while it digested. I’m like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.” Like Nell, anyone who dies inside Hill House is destined to remain there as a spirit forever. This, in turn, explains why the Dudleys make Hugh (Henry Thomas) promise to never sell or destroy Hill House after Liv (Carla Gugino) poisons their daughter Abigail (Olive Elise Abercrombie) on the Crain’s final night there. Basically, the Red Room is where the house feeds on the emotions and fears of its potential victims. As Liv tells Nell on the night of their Red Room tea party, “We are the key.” Sign up for our Entertainment Newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Megan McCluskey at megan.mccluskey@time.com.<doc-sep>Photo: Steve Dietl/Netflix Spoilers below for Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House and its ending. Trauma builds walls. Left untended, they keep going up. Soon, you’re trapped in a house of its making: long hallways leading nowhere, empty rooms, doors that swing open and slam shut by the weather of your moods. You climb the stairs and shout through the windows, hungry for a way out, lost in the labyrinthine sinew of personal devastation. Some of us find an escape. Some of us don’t. Netflix’s new ten-episode horror series, The Haunting of Hill House, uses Shirley Jackson’s famous novel as a road map to explore this house-as-body metaphor, and it does so with a profound and precise tenderness. Creator and director Mike Flanagan crafts a wholly unique haunted-house fable — abandoning the book’s paranormal investigation plot — using the hollow halls of a disordered mansion to tell the story of the disordered family who lives there. The hidden ghosts of Hill House aren’t nameless spooks trapped between spiritual realms; they are personal manifestations for the people they haunt, visual aids for the truths they must accept and vanquish. It’s not a paranormal story so much as a meditation on the distinct way grief and trauma maim the living. And it’s scary as hell. Hill House follows the Crain family, who move into the eponymous mansion in the early ’90s with the intention of flipping it, selling it, and using the profit to build their “forever house.” Patriarch Hugh (Henry Thomas) is a loving, dedicated father and husband, and his wife Olivia (Carla Gugino) a dreamy free spirit with a maternal warmth that glows off the screen. Their five children — Steven (Paxton Singleton), Shirley (Lulu Wilson), Theodora (Mckenna Grace), and twins Nell and Luke (Violet McGraw and Julian Hilliard) — explore their new home, but are more trepidatious of it than their parents, feeding more directly off its malignity, seeing things only children might: specters in the dark, phantom bugs, rooms that shouldn’t exist. Hugh and Olivia initially chalk the kids’ anxieties up to childhood imagination, but Olivia soon falls under the same spell as her kids. One night, something tragic and mysterious happens — the exact circumstance is nestled in the show’s deliberately obfuscated storytelling — and Hugh flees Hill House with his children in tow, leaving Olivia behind. She dies, but we don’t know how because her children don’t know, and Hill House keeps us locked to their perspectives. The mystery of their mother’s final, fatal moments haunts them into adulthood. Her loss is the house they must escape. We spend most of our time with the grown-up, present-day Crains. Steven (Michiel Huisman) is now the best-selling author of a book about his family’s paranormal experiences at Hill House, though he remains a skeptic. Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser) is a mortician who lives in a funeral home with her husband and two children. Theodora (Kate Siegel), a child psychologist with psychometric abilities, lives in Shirley’s guest house, filling her void with booze and one-night stands. The twins have fared worst in their mother’s absence: Nell (Victoria Pedretti) is clinically depressed and manic, and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is addicted to heroin. The two weave in and out of their older siblings’ lives, burdening them with their sharper anguish. They were the only Crain children there for their mother’s final moments, and so they carry the weight of her absence. The first episode of Hill House ends with a sting that sets the tone for the series. After scaring her father Hugh (played by Timothy Hutton in the present) with a chilling phone call, Nell turns up in Steven’s apartment. He’s annoyed that she’s arrived unannounced, but before he can fully chastise her, Hugh calls with bad news: Nell is dead. She killed herself in Hill House. Steven, frightened, turns to face whoever or whatever is in his home. Nell, suddenly right behind him, begins to scream, her face contorting into a grey, deadly vision before she disappears. Nell, who in her childhood was haunted by a disfigured ghost she called the “Bent-Neck Lady,” has become that ghost herself, the victim of an inborn phantom that lives in all of the Crain children, but most tragically in her. Each Crain gets their own bottle episode, but Nell’s — episode five, named after the Bent-Neck Lady — is the crux of the series, an inevitable hour of impending doom that marries paranormal activity with psychological calamity. Nell, like her mother, is okay until she isn’t, happy until life grips her psyche and suffocates her sanity. We witness her evolution from a young, happy bride whose struggles with sleep paralysis are cushioned by her technician husband, to a widow undone by his sudden death. We watch as she spins out of control — enabling Luke’s addiction by buying him drugs, lashing out at visiting Theo, crashing Steven’s book reading and accusing him of trading her personal pain for profit. Lost in the depths of her mania, she flies from her Los Angeles home to just outside of Boston, back to Hill House, where she sees the ghost of her mother. “Mommy,” Nell calls out, her voice breaking. Olivia is scrawling “Welcome home, Eleanor” in red chalk on the wall, a clear link between a mental disorder shared by mother and daughter, the house as their meeting point. Nell then wanders through Hill House in a dreamy trance. She sees the mirage of a happy family; she dances with her husband. Then she hangs herself from the same staircase where her mother plunged to her own death two decades earlier, under the influence of mental illness or ghosts — ghosts that may or may not exist, but they are wildly real to the women they break. Many shows tell stories about grief and mental illness — This Is Us, The Affair, A Million Little Things — but rarely with such an authentic gravity as The Haunting of Hill House. It’s the little things: the blunt way an adult Steven tells his father, “I miss my mom”; a model of the “forever home” that Shirley keeps in her office; the gloves Theodora wears to avoid her telepathic abilities, but also because they were her mother’s suggestion. A sober Luke clinging desperately to the female friend he made in rehab, looking for whatever vestige of salvation he can find. The way Hugh whispers to his dead wife as if she’s standing beside him, knowing full well she isn’t. Nell realizing she was the Break-Neck Lady all along, visions of her future suicide coloring the brighter days of her youth. As the child of a dead mother, Hill House struck me in my core, especially in the show’s beautiful centerpiece sixth episode, “Two Storms.” As the Crains gather at Shirley’s funeral home for Nell’s wake, the brunt force of their grief boils over in ways anyone intimately familiar with loss will recognize. Filmed in a series of continuous long takes, the episode is suffocating: We watch in real-time as the Crain siblings bite at their mutual insecurities and shared grief, and air out their anxieties. “There were seven of us, and now there’s five, because two of us decided to die,” Shirley says through tears, condemning her mother and sister before circling back around to Nell’s pain. “I wish she felt like she could have talked to me.” Theo pours drink after drink, Steven and Luke share childhood stories of their sister, while Hugh wanders the halls of the funeral parlor, stumbling on a memory from their Hill House days that links his daughter’s suicide to the early stages of his wife’s paranoia. Hill House makes great use of its setting and genre, with plenty of jump scares, ghouls, and gore to satiate horror fans. But its power is not in how thoughtfully it scares, but in how deeply it penetrates.<doc-sep>So who exactly is Hugh Crain? As we approach the season finale, we've gotten a much broader picture of the patriarch of the Crain family and the man he was in the past is nothing like the man he is in the future. A determined "fixer", the younger Hugh took Hill House head-on, old haunted tales and scared children be damned! Now older Hugh has had years and years to reflect on the past, while he's been essentially isolated from his children. But they are all reunited on The Haunting of Hill House Season 1 Episode 7 and the reunion is equal parts awkward and heartbreaking. Not exactly a bold prediction by me, but I did guess a few weeks back that Hugh was seeing and talking to Olivia still and that was confirmed shortly before the funeral. There was something incredible about seeing Olivia at different moments throughout the day admiring her children and the people they'd become, as well as offering Hugh both support and advice. Related: The Haunting of Hill House Season 1 Review: Mr. Smiley & The Floating Man It's clear that Hugh is completely disconnected from all his children and also a bit disconnected from how to be their father. It's such a stark contrast from the Hugh in the past who was a doting, gentle dad, even when preoccupied and stubborn. He was very much present, but after the events of Hill House, he seems to have drifted away. I found myself increasingly frustrated with the younger Hugh, as he was so fixated on his job, fixing the house, that he ignored all the warning signs around him. His kids were clearly terrified and his wife was displaying increasingly odd behavior. Yet, it took Mr. Dudley's tale to convince him to maybe get Olivia out of the house for a bit. Olivia's death has been hanging over the series since the beginning and as we get closer to learning what truly happened to her that final night, we also get to see her decline as she spends more and more time within the house. Her actions are off-putting at best and downright dangerous at worst, yet Hugh still doesn't have the sense of urgency you would expect. Is that the great regret of Hugh's life? Related: The Haunting of Hill House Review - 'Twas A Dark And Stormy Night It appears he harbors a lot of grief about his actions then and right afterward and he's trying to make amends. His talks with Theo and Luke were both poignant. There was a lot left unsaid, but it was a start for all of them. Even when Hugh was unable to just listen, he was able to at least show them he cared. And while Hugh tried to bridge the gap with his children, the gaps between the siblings were continuing to grow. Especially between Shirley and Theodora who began The Haunting of Hill House Season 1 Episode 8 still at odds. Theo: Did you just punch me in the boob? Shirley: Yeah. Yeah! You kiss my husband, that's what you get. You get punched in the fucking boob. And you get evicted from my fucking house. Permalink: Yeah. Yeah! You kiss my husband, that's what you get. You get punched in the fucking boob.... Permalink: Yeah. Yeah! You kiss my husband, that's what you get. You get punched in the fucking boob.... And Shirley has every reason to be upset with both her husband and her sister, considering what little she saw of their interaction in the closet. But Theo just wanted a chance to talk to her sister and Shirley wasn't giving an inch until they were literally forced out of the house by the mysterious knocking. While Theo and Luke see things and become rattled fairly easily, both Shirley and Steven seem to take the appearance of otherworldly creatures and creepy happenings rather well. Shirley almost seems more annoyed with the disturbances than actually scared. Even when Nell makes her presence known during a particularly nasty exchange between the sisters, Theo is horrified and Shirley is merely just bothered. Theo's monologue about touching Nell's body and the nothingness she felt was a gorgeous piece of acting. It was devastatingly real and acted to perfection by Kate Siegel. Theo has been my favorite Crain throughout the season and she cemented her place with that scene alone. It was impossible to look away. Related: Get HBO via Prime Video Channels for Addictive Dramas, Hilarious Comedies & Hit Movies Opposite the sisters are father and son on an unfortunate road trip to find Luke. Steven harbors a ton of resentment towards his dad, possibly more than all of his siblings combined, and it started to seep out during the car ride. And it's hard to not blame Steven for the way he feels but it's also frustrating to see him make excuses instead of listening. Come to think of it, adult Steven is very much like younger Hugh. And as their worlds continue to erode, Steven would do well to listen for a change and trust his own eyes. The real sickness within the Crains is Hill House. Stray Observations Mr. Dudley's story about his wife, finding a skeleton in the wall after hearing scratching noises for days and my wife straddling me with a screwdriver to my throat would probably be enough to get me the heck out of that house. The episodes are getting increasingly scarier and the series is all the better for it. Perhaps I just want to see the best in Luke, but I never doubted for a second that he stole Theo's car and Shirley's bank card for the greater good and not to get high. I was glad to be proved right, but sad when I realized where he was headed. Timothy Hutton's sad face just gets me every time. With only two episodes to go, I'd really like to know what you guys are hoping to see by the end of the season. What are your predictions for the finale? Do you think there will be more death? Will Hill House ever be defeated? Make sure you leave all your comments down below so we can talk it all out! And don't forget to watch The Haunting of Hill House online so you're caught up on the hottest show of the year! Eulogy Review Editor Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 4.5 / 5.0 1 2 3 4 5 User Rating: 5.0 / 5.0 1 2 3 4 5 Rating: 5.0 / 5.0 ( 8 Votes) 4.5 / 5.0 Whitney Evans is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow her on Twitter.<doc-sep>
Warning: The following contains spoilers for the entirety of Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House, all 10 episodes. Proceed with caution. It's safe to assume these days that a supernatural TV drama isn't going to end with us, the viewers, getting every answer or solving all the mysteries we faced over the season. So it was with Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House, which after 10 episodes of family secrets and unexpected zombie torsos, left us wondering what exactly we'd seen. That's not to say that Hill House's ending wasn't satisfying, but it may feel that way at first. It's certainly a game-changer and doesn't explain half the specters haunting the Crains (and us!) all season, but it merits a second viewing to solidify the journey we just went on and what it all means. By this time, nine episodes into Hill House, we've dealt with some major shocks and twists, such as that Nell is the "bent-neck lady" she's been seeing for years or that Luke's imaginary friend Abigail was real and killed by Olivia when the house consumed her mind. That primed us to expect equally painful discoveries in the finale, beginning with a shocking reveal about the Red Room: We've been inside it before. We revisit a scene from episode 1 in which young Nellie and Shirley try a skeleton key on the door but to no avail. It's cut together with another scene; Theo in her dance studio, experiencing disturbance when someone tries the door. At first the simultaneous occurrences barely compute – is this a flashback? A comparison? Will something emerge to tie the events together? But no, this is what happened, what always happened. Theo unknowingly accessed the Red Room, which always appeared to her as her dance studio, and when she locked the door it turned back into that ominous red door that no one else could get through. It was Nellie's toy room, Olivia's reading room, Steve's game room, and Luke's tree house. Image: Steve Dietl/Netflix In those times, when they weren't afraid of or fighting the house, the Crains opened themselves up to it. They revealed their inner, individual lives to the Red Room, which gave them what they wanted as it fed off their vulnerability, learned their behavior and fears. Back in the present, Hill House is after the Crain siblings, but its old horrors have a recent acquisition they didn't bargain for: Nell. Despite its thirst to acquire her, the House can't contend with the youngest sister's kindness and consideration. It couldn't corrupt her the way it corrupted her mother, lonely Liv whose ghost just pushed her daughter to death. As the house pulls each sibling under, it confronts them, not with their greatest fear, but with their biggest source of guilt. "Fear and guilt are sisters," Theo's lover tells her in a nightmare. Fear is what made the Crains, as children, susceptible to Hill House; guilt is what brought them back. Nell pulls them out, because all of them feel guilt about not believing or helping her more – and they're all running from the guilt about her death. You deserve better, sweet Nellie. Image: Tina Rowden/Netflix Once they're all conscious (it was touch-and-go with Luke there), Nell appears to them clearly and explains the nature of the Red Room. She also touches upon something the show plays with a little throughout its 10 episodes: Time. It isn't linear, but random and ongoing. "Our moments fall around us like rain," she says. That's the only explanation we get for Nell visiting her younger self throughout her tragically short life, or for the writing on Hill House's walls or Olivia having nightmares about her dead adult child. With what little time they all have left together, the siblings apologize to Nell, who assuages their guilt and tells them she loves them. She disappears, this time we know, for good. Locked out of the room, Hugh faces the ghost of Olivia, no longer herself after years of Hill House eating away at her mind and soul. Seeing her husband sparks enough of her old self for her to remember their love for each other and the children. He manages to reason with her, to negotiate the kids' release in exchange for his own life. When the siblings leave, the house doesn't stop them, on their mother's command. It's done with them now.