Spoilers for season one of Haunting of Hill House
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I was really annoyed by the ending of Haunting of Hill House. (I love talking on Twitter about shows!) Hecate and many other people agreed with me. I’m a horror fan and I also love cheesy Hallmark movies, but those two genres go together like oil and water. The last two episodes of the series had heavy-handed ridiculous dialogue and stupid plot twists, all with a syrupy score to emphasize just how far it went off the rails. This was so dissapointing because the show was almost masterful in its use of atmospheric horror and flashbacks up until that point. I’ve read it described as a creepy version of This is Us and that sounds accurate. Regardless it almost ended with everyone dying, according to the series creator Mike Flanagan, who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter. He explained the original vision for the ending, and how he decided that showing them happy, having Clara die in the house, and including a ridiculous voiceover about love and fear being two sides of the same coin was the right ending. (My words.) Here’s what he told them:

Let’s talk about the very end of the season. While the family members still alive come together to celebrate Luke’s (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) sobriety, we get a monologue from Steven about how fear and love are the same types of emotion. They’re like siblings, both involving the relinquishment of logic and patterns. Why did you choose to end the Crain story this way?

A lot of it is a shared experience we all connected with in the room. It’s really hard to resolve horror; it’s hard to end stories like this. We had been through so much in the course of writing it. Each of us had dug so deep into our own families and stories to try to inform the show that we all craved a moment of peace at the end.

We toyed with the idea for a little while that over that monologue, over the image of the family together, we would put the Red Room window in the background. For a while, that was the plan. Maybe they never really got out of that room. The night before it came time to shoot it, I sat up in bed, and I felt guilty about it. I felt like it was cruel. That surprised me. I’d come to love the characters so much that I wanted them to be happy. I came in to work and said, “I don’t want to put the window up. I think it’s mean and unfair.” Once that gear had kicked in, I wanted to lean as far in that direction as possible. We’ve been on this journey for 10 hours; a few minutes of hope was important to me.

[From The Hollywood Reporter via BGR]

You know how you resolve horror without killing people? You show characters who are suffering from PTSD, but who still kicked ass and remained true to themselves. (See the Halloween reboot.) You don’t change the storylines so much that it seems inauthentic. Luke should have died of that overdose. Theodora should be living alone and sleeping around, that’s her thing. Steve should be dating his lame fans. Shirley should still be hiding her affair from her husband and holding a grudge against him. Also, what does Henry even do? We never saw much of his backstory after his wife killed herself. I really care about these characters and I was invested in them up until about the eighth episode. Flanagan didn’t kill them all because he felt bad, but he wrapped the story up in a moldy pink bow that I don’t want to open again.

Speaking of that, there’s talk of a second season because of course there is. Flanagan said that if that happens he’ll go in another direction with it and won’t continue to tell this family’s story because “the Crains have been through enough.” That sounds like a good plan.

I know I spelled dialogue wrong!

Is anyone else really pissed off about the ending of #HauntingofHillHouse? I’m watching it now and rolling my eyes. The dialog is shitty the ending is maudlin and I’m mad. It lost the thread a couple of episodes before the end.

— celebitchy (@celebitchy) October 24, 2018

One more and I’m done. This is the worst claptrap I’m so pissed off. “Fear is the relinquishment of logic. The willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. But so it seems, is love. Love is the relinquishment of logic.” #HauntingofHillHouse ending sucks pic.twitter.com/ua1BmxOD2w

— celebitchy (@celebitchy) October 24, 2018