“Netflix’s new adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is far from a familiar version of a well-known tale.
“Jackson’s 20th-century horror classic is a case study in mind games; as represented in the 1963 Robert Wise film adaptation The Haunting, it’s more a tale of psychological terror than the supernatural — if indeed there’s anything ghostly at all lurking within the dark, decrepit mansion known as Hill House.
“The new version, directed and written by Mike Flanagan (Hush, Ouija: Origin of Evil), is really more like fanfiction about the haunted house at its center laid atop the bones of the source material.
“But luckily for all of us, what it loses in faithfulness to plot it makes up for in faithfulness to Jackson’s fixation with the psychological nature of terror, and close studies of her characters.”
Read more at Vox
