LogFAQs > #954441638

Series 32. The Haunting of Bly Manor (8-episode miniseries, 2020)
Series 31. The Haunting of Hill House (8-episode miniseries, 2018)

So starting here, there's genuinely a lot of stuff I did like about these shows, even if they're not entirely up my alley.

This is an anthology-style series, so like True Detective or whatever, they would make sense to be ranked separately. That said, they wound up ranking right next to each other because they did so many things similarly. Notably, both stories are about haunted houses, but more specifically look at the trauma that haunted-house survivors face.

As I mentioned in the Poltergeist writeup, I'm not that big into horror movies and horror tropes. These Haunting shows are like love letters to the genre. I'm also not into overly slow and artsy stuff, but the Haunting shows clearly have prestige-TV ambitions (there's like a ten-minute shot full of characters walking in and out of a room in one of the middle episodes - a neat camera trick/difficult stunt, but not a particularly interesting scene).

Hill House, the first season, sticks out way more in my memory. Decades after surviving a haunted house, five siblings find themselves drawn to it once again. There are unresolved mysteries about the past and there's lots of ill will between how the characters have ended up. Drug addiction, media exploitation, and fixation with dead people feature a lot, and the arguments can be pretty unfun to watch.

And yet there's something quite powerful about how it all comes together. The horror they experienced as children is what split up the family, so when they find themselves drawn back together, they wind up confronting it together. The most interesting hook about the story (and a surefire gimmick to please me) is the point-of-view structure. Like in LOST, each of the first five episodes centers on one of the siblings' entire story. Watching them in this order reveals truths about interactions that we've previously only seen from another sibling's POV. The final of these POV episodes feels like a true climax, resolving a major mystery and giving the most powerful emotional torque.

Season 2 isn't as memorable in my mind, but while S1's story sticks out to me a lot, both share the same melancholy yet somewhat hopeful tone. Both also lean into some of the worse tropes that they could have chosen, but overall, while I may be somewhat unhappy that I wasted entire days to watch these in a row, I'm glad I watched both of these. Other than the fact that my fiancee now refuses to sleep without a night light.
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness