Craig Scott

I'll be brief.......I so love Shirley Jackson's original classic....The fantastic opening paragraph, the creepy house and surroundings, the intense psychological study of her characters in a slow build up to insanity and beyond , and the tragic though predictable conclusion.......And I even liked the original 1963 black and white British film ' The Haunting' which stayed true to the original story and was quite frightening and well made.....that's where it should have stopped. The ghastly attempts at remakes and rewrites that have taken place since then should all have been aborted in the womb. This current Netflix melodrama is no different. It could have stood on it's own merits without incorporating the 'Hill House' franchise into the title.....The story itself which unfolds over 10 episodes or so has absolutely nothing to do with Jackson's original masterpiece. It does however continuously attempt to tie in bits and pieces of the original story into this new story and only serves to make me angry when it does so....it feels like plagiarism. I'll admit that for me the new story was a bit hard to follow as it jumps around between different time periods and different characters and I was a good 4 or 5 episodes in before I comfortably knew who everybody was and what was going on. The characters are also extremely ( and I mean extremely ) long winded ! Every episode offers an opportunity for one or more character to go off into a long melodramatic monologue....it can be downright Shakespearean. At least there are no soliloquies ...lol.....Don't get me wrong, the actors in this series are very good and they have to love how they get so many opportunities to ham it up for the cameras but all in all it's just a little over the top melodramatic for me . I can see what they were trying to do though......they were trying to achieve the slow moving eerie psychological horror of the original book and movie but really only succeeded in the 'slow moving' category.....I would have given it 2.5 stars out of 5 had they left 'Hill House' out of it but alas I'm afraid that poor Shirley is once again rolling in her grave so I shall deduct a half star......