The Haunting of Hill House ep. 2 - Perversion

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Open Casket

Episode 1 of "Hill House" shows us a man who, like so many men before him, sublimates his anxiety about death by claiming ownership over his narrative. Steve makes his family's baggage digestible for the world so that he can elude his own psychic heartburn. Lucky for him this sublimating process involves becoming a best-selling author. We all bear this burden of grappling with our childhood fixations, be they positive or negative. The world pressures us to transform these haunts into something that will make us money. Episode 2 shows us Shirley's trajectory into her own career: funeral home director.

Unlike Steve's impulse to to pin his childhood into the pages of a book like a butterfly, Shirley's primary directive has always been to help. Her nurturing soul is put to the test when she imprints on an abandoned litter of kittens in a shed. There are five kittens, just as there are five siblings. But life is fragile, and it isn't long until one of the kittens wiggles its last.

To navigate her grief, her parents stage a modest funeral. She asks to see the dead creature in the box. After a few heartfelt words, Shirley is alarmed to see the kitten's throat move-- breath? She picks it up to her parents' distress and insists that it's alive actually, it's alive! This fantasy collapses when the kitten's lips part to reveal a large bug working its way out of the esophagus.

This is an iconic "Hill House" scene, one that stuck with me long after my first viewing. Director Flanagan has placed us so close to young Shirley during the stress of mourning that we are entirely unprepared for the dirty trick of hope to rear its head. Part of us knows her parents are right to disavow her of the fantasy, but then again, we see the throat moving too.

At her mother's funeral she refuses to confront the reality of the titular Open Casket. Perhaps she is afraid of more accidental hope, perhaps afraid of the dark realities of decomposition. It is a funeral director who ushers her to the casket, upon which she exclaims, "You fixed her!" This moment of catharsis spurs Shirley to help others achieve closure in the midst of grief. 

Not all of her compulsions are altruistic. There's something else going on here, which we see as she encourages a young boy named Max to replace his mental picture of his late grandmother with "a better one." We see it as she corrects the Freudian slips of others throughout the episode (Max accidentally calls the 'casket' a 'castle'). We see this in her need to see the dead kitten, and most of all in her insistence that she must work on the corpse of her own sister.

She needs to know.

Steve takes ownership of the story to shape it in a way that feels safe, but Shirley copes by seeking unadulterated truth. Most of all she is hurt by her father's withholding of what happened to their mother that night. "He can't not tell us again," she seethes upon hearing news of Nelly's suicide thirdhand, via Steve via her father.

This thirst for knowledge is its own mechanism of control. Shirley takes it upon herself to eject Luke from Nelly's wedding, because she wants to protect Nelly from whatever ruination his addiction will bring. She knows the worst will happen. Likewise, she is compelled to fix young Max by pestering him to repress against his will. She will only let herself bear the burdens of the dead.

This perverted sense of responsibility metastasizes in her work on Nelly's corpse, a sequence that cross-cuts between Shirley painting her dead sister's face and Shirley doing make-up for her live sister's wedding. It's a brutal few scenes, perhaps the best of the show so far. The episode as a whole contains shockingly little spooky supernatural content, instead confronting us with the workmanlike reality of such a casual relationship to the decaying human form. Body horror lacquered with the tired sheen of professionalism, a front that crumbles with the immediacy of working on a beloved sibling.

This episode works so well because Flanagan knows not to gild the lily. It's enough to see the death process for what it is. Sometimes, little creatures full of life become stiff and still. Sometimes, the immediacy of death reminds us that it is inevitable. Sooner or later, the bugs will come to feast.

Kids see things that aren't real, and when you grow up, you can make them. This is the wisdom passed on to young Shirley by her mother, as she gestures towards architectural plans for her family's dream house. These words are about the sacred act of creation, but they also reveal the power of grown-ups' repressed anxieties. When Shirley "fixes" these bodies, she believes that she is making the fantasy real-- but she must eventually confront the Real that lurks underneath the second face.

9 / 10