the red room, revisted

I've spent the last couple of nights rewatching (again) the brilliance that is The Haunting of Hill House and marvellng over how Jackson's work serves as a spark and a guide, but the series builds so much around it, sot of like the mask embedded in the tool shed in the second episode. The orginal source is there, and visible and recognizable, but so much else happens.  This is true of Blythe Manor as well, which touches on many of the same themes and horror tropes, but HH always has been my favorite for the family drama at its center, this wrought thing that holds so much in its web.--inherited trauma, mental illness, addiction, and also the supernatural, and a haunted structure that rivals the Overlook in its ingenuity and feeds on its residents.  And in fact some of the best moments are the dramatic ones that happen within the bones of the house. The conclusions and resolutions that have less to do with ghosts and more the personal dynamics. 

When you watch something for the third or fourth or fifth time, as I have with this, the scares are known...so they lose some punch, but the dread and eerieness remain, the scene that is set. While the jump scares do not stop the heart, the feelings are deeper that they evoke..horrific is maybe the best word. Once you know what happens, the experience of a film or book or series changes. You start to notice structural parallels in characters and plotlines. I still say the bent-neck lade, who turned out to be the ghost of Nellie's future death haunting her since she was a child, is the most apt metaphor for depression I've seen. 

Structurally the series builds well, approaching each character's p-o-v and then merging them together before we get to that of Olivia, where the greatest mysteries lie. The penultimate episode, which is hers, is disjointed and jarring and yet also ties other, previous things together. I only wish there was more on the house and its inhabitants--the non-living, and wished that was where the subsequent seasons would go, though Blyth Manor was its own treat.

This week, I quickly watched The Midnight Club, which given both my Flanagan and Christopher Pike obsessions proved to be highly enjoyable, as thoughtful and wrought as last years Midnight Mass, it dealt nicely with mortality and death and was a good story and interweaving of Pike's works. But definitely not as chilling or scary as HH. Apparently,  the next project afoot is a Fall of the House of Usher series, which stops my little English major heart, so that will no doubt prove exciting.