The Haunting of Hill House ep. 9 - Regression

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

Screaming Meemies

Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino) is the only character in The Haunting of Hill House who isn't double-cast. Finally, in the penultimate episode of the series, the weight of that sinks in. Olivia does not have a Then and a Now. In a show rife with literalized metaphors, this storytelling choice is a quiet blow to our psyche.

Current day Olivia is a phantom limb. She is impossible. This is foreshadowed in the opening scene, when she holds her sleeping children close to her even after her arms grow numb. She asks her husband to leave them be, so it comes as something of a shock when he removes Luke undetected from her dead grasp.

Olivia is no dearly departed saint, nor is she entirely responsible for her own collapse. She is caught in an anxiety spiral, and anxiety breeds neurosis. Is there a word for something that you make true by worrying about it? Negative actualization? Prophecy? A psychotic break? More than anything else in the world, Olivia is afraid of, well, the world, and what the world will do when it gets hooks into her children. "I'm scared. That's all there is. I'm nothing else." This is the story of a woman who would squeeze her children to death to stop them from growing. It's not because she means them harm-- her own childhood trauma has instilled in her a powerful need to prevent them from experiencing the pain she has experienced. Pain that has been dulled by her beloved children, who are small enough to fall asleep in the crook of her elbow.

The "it just snuck up on me all of a sudden" scene from earlier in the season repeats, and in doing so becomes something of an mantra for Olivia's experience of the world. Her mistakes, her depression, her anxiety, her mania, they are all the more offensive for being unexpected. So, too, she did not expect to make a new friend.

The yappy flapper ghost is by far the chattiest specter, and the most venomous. A fellow mother, deeply acquainted with loss, she spins intrusive thoughts to deepen Olivia's dream of rot and darkness. "You try and try to keep them safe. But it's hard, isn't it? And you can't keep them safe forever." Good parenting is about having a relationship with loss, and sharing that relationship with your kids in manageable ways. To try to cure loss is to attempt to dethrone god. To try to cure loss is to poison your children's tea.

Now Nell appears to Then Olivia with wires holding her deathbed lips shut. She cuts them to cry out: "Mommy." Maybe this is a reminder to Olivia that the brutality of pain and death is unavoidable. Maybe it is just a scream of agony, a wish that her mother could make it all go away. The way she almost made it all go away at the tea party.

"You guys go on without me," says Olivia to her husband.

"How could we?"

8.5 / 10