Warning: contains plot details for both the Netflix series and the original novel.

“Way more of a riff than an adaptation,” is how writer-director Mike Flanagan describes his The Haunting Of Hill House Netflix horror. “There’s just enough material in the book to make an amazing movie,” he told Den Of Geek, but not enough to adapt into a ten-hour TV series without adding to the story. Not wishing to go up against the acclaimed 1963 film version by attempting to “out-adapt Robert Wise,” Flanagan and co. took a different approach. 

“Look at it as a remix,” he told us. “It was more interesting to break down the book and pull out the characters and the themes and individual moments and pieces of prose, even, that had really stuck with me, and try to rearrange it.”

Here’s how those pieces were rearranged…

The Haunting Of Hill House 1959

The original novel is about thirty-two-year-old Eleanor Vance, who has spent her life caring for her invalid mother. After her mother dies, Eleanor is forced to move in with her sister and brother-in-law, sleeping in the baby’s room. When Eleanor receives an invitation from Dr John Montague, a researcher in the supernatural, to join a party planning to spend a summer at Hill House, rented for the occasion because of its ghastly and rumoured to be ghostly history, Eleanor sees a chance to escape her life. She steals the car she half-owns with her sister and takes the trip. Dr Montague had selected Eleanor because of a newspaper report on a mysterious rain of stones that once fell on her childhood home, thought to be supernatural in origin. 

At Hill House, Eleanor meets the unwelcoming Mr and Mrs Dudley, caretaker and housekeeper, who refuse to remain on the property after dark. She discovers the house to be deranged, a disorienting cacophony of architectural design that’s dark, oppressive and whose geography it’s impossible to fathom. There, she meets and befriends Theodora, her neighbour in the research proposal and a woman believed to have psychic tendencies. They meet Dr Montague and the final guest, Luke Sanderson, who has been included in the party at the behest of the house’s current owner, his aunt. Luke will one day inherit Hill House. 

Eleanor tells little lies about her life to the other guests. She describes a house she saw on her journey as her own, and pretends to own a “cup of stars” that she heard discussed by a family of strangers while dining in a restaurant on her way to Hill House. Despite an early fondness for Theo, Eleanor soon begins to feel persecuted by her, and develops a sense of paranoia about the other guests talking behind her back.

Dr Montague encourages his three guests to make notes on their experiences of Hill House. They discover mysterious drops in temperature, violent knocking on the doors and a dog-like creature running through the ground floor. Writing appears in blood along the wood panelling, asking Eleanor for help. Theodora’s room is ransacked and her clothes covered in blood (though her things are later found to be untouched). 

After several such occurrences, Eleanor begins to feel an affinity with the house. Her paranoia and guilt, and her fear of the knocking sound (which she takes to be the sound of her dying mother knocking on the wall for medication Eleanor never brought her) conflate until one night, in what might be described as a manic episode, she runs through the house, scaring the other guests, and climbs up a vertiginous and rickety spiral staircase. Luke brings her back down and the others force her to leave the next day, contacting her sister and discovering the lies she told.

Not wanting to leave, having nowhere to go and feeling that Hill House was where she belonged, Eleanor deliberately accelerates her car into a tree on the way out of the house, presumably killing herself. Dr Montague’s research is unsuccessful on publication, and he gives up his interest in the supernatural. Hill House though, not sane, remains. 

The Haunting Of Hill House 2018

One summer in the 1980s, Hugh and Olivia Crain buy Hill House to flip for profit, moving in with their five children—Steven, Shirley, Theodora and twins Nel and Luke—during the renovation works. Nel complains of seeing a “bent-neck lady” ghost, but is reassured by her father that she’s just dreaming. Luke befriends a strangely dressed little girl who, he says, lives in the woods near the house. The family experience myriad strange occurrences during their time in the house, including strange cold spots (as experienced by the characters in Jackson’s novel), and a mysterious locked door that no key is able to open. The mother, Olivia Crain, becomes affected and disturbed by the house.

Unlike Jackson’s novel, the Netflix show’s chronology jumps around considerably. Each episode moves between the events of the summer at Hill House, and the lives of the grown-up Crain children. In the present, Steven is a successful author having written a bestseller The Haunting Of Hill House, which starts with the same opening paragraph as Shirley Jackson’s novel, including the line “whatever walked there, walked alone.”  

A failed historical novelist, Steven’s best-selling memoir about his family’s time at Hill House estranged him from his siblings who saw it as exploitative of their shared experience at the house, an experience that has affected them all in different ways. Luke is a drug addict in and out of rehab, Nel is a depressive, Theo is a child psychologist with a fear of commitment, and Shirley runs a funeral home with her husband.

While Nel (Eleanor), Luke and Theodora all share the same names as characters in Jackson’s novel, they aren’t the same characters. (One connection is that modern-day Theo is a lesbian, linking her to her namesake in the book, who, the subtext of the novel strongly suggests was also in a cohabiting relationship with another woman, but that’s more or less it). Eldest daughter Shirley is named for Shirley Jackson, while the Crain father Hugh shares his name with Hill House’s original designer in the novel. 

Only two characters, stern caretaker and housekeeper Mr and Mrs Dudley, survive intact from the novel to the TV series, though modernised and expanded with a full backstory. Mr Dudley tells Hugh Crain that his mother was the original housekeeper at the property (perhaps the Mrs Dudley in the novel?) and that he was born in the cottage at the edge of the estate.  

Other nods to Shirley Jackson and the original are dotted around Flanagan’s story. In one scene Theo is reading a copy of Jackson’s famous The Lottery And Other Stories. The novel’s account of Eleanor and her sister experiencing the telekenetic rain of stones as children is borrowed for a monologue by one central character.

The house itself, with its marble statuary and monumental spiral staircase, has been rendered faithfully. Its competing architectural styles and sense of derangement are achieved through dark walls and disorienting design. 

There are multiple nods to other parts of the book in the Netflix series, references to Eleanor’s “little cup of stars”, and quotes from Shakespeare (Olivia Crain quotes from Hamlet just as Eleanor Vance repeatedly quotes from Twelfth Night in the novel). There are deaths, 

While both tell a horror story about the same not-sane house that is grounded in psychological realism and features many of the same rich details, they’re entirely different stories, not least in their respective endings. The novel closes on a note of unfinished tragedy, while Flanagan’s complex, emotional series tempers its tragedy with resolution, healing and hope.

The Haunting Of Hill House is out on Netflix now.

On July 19th 2013, unbeknownst at the time to those involved, blockbuster cinema underwent a little bit of a change.

This was a day, after all, when three major studio films opened in cinemas at the US box office. One, a big budget sequel, starring Bruce Willis. The other, a summer comic book movie starring Ryan Reynolds. The third, a taut, intense horror film that’d cost $20m to make: a tenth of the budget of the other two films combined.

Thankfully, there’s a massive headline at the top of this article to steer you as to where all this is going, and break up the suspense a little. But suspense is what helped spring The Conjuring – see how we did that? Seamless! – to a staggering worldwide gross of $319m. 

The Conjuring, though, was a phenomenon, the breakout hit of the summer, and a film that traditional odds were stacked a little against.

Sure, director James Wan had previously steered Saw and Insidious to success, profit and the need for its audience to do a bit more laundry afterwards, but still: The Conjuring didn’t have a big name movie star, it’s not laden with heavy special effects, and it had an R-rating (15 in the UK).

Furthermore, Wan didn’t want blood, gore and violence overpowering the movie. He reckoned that atmospheric chills might be the wiser way forward. And he was right.

Here, then, are some juicy nerdy facts you might not know about the film…

Buy now on DVD or Blu-ray  〉

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Right then. It’s worth contextualising that the general rule of thumb to this point with horror movies was release them in the summer at your peril, and expect the second week drop-off at the box office – once genre fans had soaked it in – to be dramatic. The Conjuring kept going for weeks, though, and opened studio eyes to an audience thirst for having the bejesus scared out of them in high summer that they’d be blind to before.

Sequel talk inevitably started quickly, but again, The Conjuring showed there was another way to go, whilst retaining and engaging its audience. So much so, in fact, that a horror cinematic universe was organically born (as opposed to dictated from the boardroom), as Wan set about recruiting interesting filmmakers (director David F Sandberg for one, who’s now working on 2019 comic book blockbuster, Shazam!), and exploring the murky corners of the Conjuring world (that in itself was grounded in a real-life story).

Interestingly – and again, against hit movie convention – one thing Wan resisted was the immediate urge to make a sequel. Instead, work began on a prequel story, Annabelle. In fact, a direct sequel to The Conjuring wouldn’t follow until 2016, and we’re being kept waiting for The Conjuring 3.

In the meantime, the Annabelle films have taken the baton of terrorising audiences, joined this year by another smash hit, The Nun. A further splinter of the Conjuring universe, The Crooked Man, is also in development, based on the character first introduced in The Conjuring 2. Fan response has suggested that the willingness to divert from a straight line of sequels has been wildly successful.

As for the two films that The Conjuring opened against, the ones for whom box office expectations were originally much higher? Those respective franchises have been quietly retired…

11.2 The Ghost Monument

Last week’s premiere of Doctor Who’s eleventh series was plagued and blessed with so much build-up and anticipation over the months since Jodie Whittaker’s casting was announced that the only thing left for episode two – The Ghost Monument – to address was, what now?

What now that Whittaker has proven herself as a worthy successor to Capaldi, Smith et al, and Chibnall has shown fans both old and new that he’s not out to spoil their fun? The Ghost Monument’s hill to climb is not as big as the previous hour’s, but it’s a chance to really settle into this brave new Who. Be glad, then, that it’s mostly the same balance of fun, pathos and adventure that The Woman Who Fell To Earth was.

As with last week, the plot and alien threat take a back seat to getting to know these new characters and reestablishing the Doctor as the inquisitive, eccentric, pacifist that she’s always been. At this point, it’s safe to say that Chibnall’s version of the show is going to be slightly less manic than it’s been of late, with the poignant moment always chosen over the humorous one.

The companions – sorry, new best friends – are still all charming and dripping with chemistry with one another, and one thing the episode does brilliantly is build character without having to take time out from the main plot. This is an ensemble show now, so it won’t be as easy as it might have been to have an episode in which Rose and Martha are fleshed out via their family in episode four or five.

Instead, we have snippets of conversation between Ryan and Graham, or Ryan and Yaz, that feel much like real life (if real life involved being stranded on an alien planet). Even though the Doctor is still adjusting to her new body and fully intending to drop her new friends back home as soon as she locates the TARDIS, she also manages – perhaps accidentally – to bond with them one on one.

Toisin Cole’s Ryan is still the stand-out for me, with the exuberance of a young guy dropped into the adventure of his life mixed with the vulnerability brought on by his dyspraxia and the lack of self-confidence it causes. Yaz, after episode two, remains the least fleshed out, but it’s still early days and she’ll surely get her chance.

With introductions all done and points all more or less proven, The Ghost Monument has a little more room to breathe. It still feels like setup, but it’s setup done with the backdrop of recognisable Doctor Who plot and characters. What’s more, it leaves you with a sense that things might feel a little more ‘normal’ come episode three, and this new Doctor can exit panic mode for the first time.

Overall, Whittaker has proven such a natural with the material that it’s tempting to say the character’s gender-swap has been forgotten, but I suspect it’s something many of us will refuse to take for granted as this semi-reboot continues to take shape.

The Ghost Monument airs on Sunday the 14th of October at 6.55pm on BBC One. Come back after the episode for Pete Dillon-Trenchard’s spoiler-free review.

It’s a frustrating time to be a Sophie Turner fan. The final season of HBO’s ratings-hogger Game Of Thrones won’t arrive until well into 2019, and Dark Phoenix, the forthcoming X-Men film that the actress will be the centre of, has just had its release date pushed back – again – until the summer of next year.

Here’s something to tide you over, then! A first trailer for Turner’s new sci-fi rom-com Time Freak has arrived. Andrew Bowler has directed this feature based on his 2011 short film of the same name, and it looks to be the sort of thing you’d watch on an evening and go “ahh, that was nice.”

Turner’s co-stars here are Asa Butterfield (who led the ill-fated Ender’s Game adaptation) and Santa Clarita Diet‘s Skyler Gisondo. The two of them will be rewinding time as often as they can to ensure a perfect romance is realised between Butterfield’s science geek Stillman and Turner’s Debbie. Likely by the end, they’ll discover that no such thing can exist, but we’re speculating.

Take a look…

Here’s a quick synopsis, too, if you can’t watch the trailer at the moment:

If you could turn back time…could you win back the love of your life? That’s the problem puzzling Stillman (Asa Butterfield, Ender’s Game), a physics genius recently dumped by his stunning girlfriend Debbie (Sophie Turner, “Game of Thrones”). So after creating a timeline of their romance and a machine to rewind the past, he grabs his wingman, Evan (Skyler Gisondo), and sets off to right every wrong he made with Debbie. But as this insane comedy proves, there are some mistakes too perfect for science to fix.

No UK release date for Time Freak has officially been set, but it’ll be available via digital in the US on 9th November. We’ll keep an eye out.

Amazon is planning on spending $8 billion on original content this year, a billion more than rival Netflix. The two streaming giants are in an arms race, each sweeping up reliable TV content creators like Shonda Rhimes, Amy Sherman-Palladino, and Ryan Murphy to bolster libraries already bursting with titles. The guiding philosophy here seems to be that if you have the means, you might as well shell out. It’s a win-win for both the platforms and the artists; Netflix and Amazon get the highly anticipated new works from some of television’s brightest minds and the creators get to execute their vision with little to no creative or budgetary oversight. The only party that may end up losing is the viewer, now more likely to suffer through self-indulgent series when there are no constraints.

This is the chief problem with Amazon’s new series The Romanoffs, from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. Despite allegations levelled at him toward the beginning of the #MeToo movement, Weiner was one of the most sought-after creators in Hollywood, with Mad Men hailed as one of the most important achievements in the prestige TV era. Amazon won the bidding war for Weiner’s next project and gave Weiner free rein to tell whatever kind of story he wanted to.

It turns out Weiner wanted to tell several different stories, jumping on the bandwagon of Hollywood’s latest trend, the anthology series. The result is a sprawling, messy, globetrotting affair, with each episode of the eight-episode season telling a different story with a different cast, only tangentially connected by the fact that some of the characters believe themselves to be living decedents of the Russian royals the Romanovs, slain during the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s an intriguing, but ultimately thin premise, and to say much more about it would certainly draw the ire of Weiner, who has continued the strict “no spoilers” policy he employed back in the Mad Men days; each screener was accompanied with a page of spoiler alerts that critics are not to mention.

One would think that an anthology format would amplify Weiner’s strengths. One of the ways that Mad Men stood out amongst other prestige TV shows was its ability to tell rather self-contained, novelistic stories with deep themes and clearly defined beginnings, middles, and ends. However, the two episodes watched for review do not have the focus of even some of Mad Men’s lesser episodes, and with each episode over a ninety-minute feature-length runtime, they do little to warrant the bloat. Many interesting topics are broached, but before Weiner digs in and explores the idea, he loses interest and moves on to something else. If you paid money to watch these in a cinema, you’d think you were watching one of Woody Allen’s ponderous late career works and wonder what the point was.

Opening installments The Violet Hour and The Royal We do feature lots of Weiner’s trappings; they’re interested in class and the problems of the wealthy, the repressed emotions of an older generation, vague depression, marital strife, suburban malaise, and feature lots of casual cruelty. Like Mad Men, the production design and costumes are jaw-droppingly great, and Weiner gets winning performances from his star-studded cast, but still, nothing in these first two episodes scream Must-Watch TV.

The Violet Hour is set in modern-day Paris and features Marthe Keller as the fabulously prickly Anushka. Though she does some stellar acting, the real star of the episode is Anushka’s extravagant, historic apartment, which Anushka’s American nephew Greg (Aaron Eckhart) and his difficult French girlfriend Sophie (Louise Bourgoin) hope to inherit. Most of the episode follows the relationship between Anushka and her new caretaker, Hajar (Inès Melab), a young Muslim woman. Anushka is blatantly racist and nationalist toward Hajar despite Hajar being born and raised in France. The whole thing eventually plays like a retread of Driving Miss Daisy, with the two forming a bond that doesn’t feel necessarily earned. Add in a shmaltzy third-act, and what could have been an interesting story about class, religion, race and legacy becomes something far slighter.

Worse is The Royal We which finds Corey Stoll playing a caricature of a Weiner male protagonist. As Michael Romanoff, Stoll is disaffected, unhappy, and “trapped” in a marriage to Shelly (Kerry Bishé), who by all accounts appears to be a catch. When Shelly books a Romanov themed cruise to bring her and her husband closer together, Michael works hard to prolong his jury duty in an open and closed case to avoid attending. Had the episode stuck with this bad faith twist on 12 Angry Men and wrapped everything up in an hour, as both parties experience time apart with attractive strangers (Janet Montgomery, Noah Wyle), The Royal We could have been a successful, amusing little effort, but instead it takes a weird, dark turn that leaves an unpleasant taste.

It’s hard to accurately write a pre-air review for The Romanoffs when each episode promises to be its own entirely different beast. It’s possible and even highly likely given Weiner’s track record that he’ll have greater success in subsequent installments, but despite stellar acting, gorgeous visuals (even if the direction is uninspired), and snappy dialogue, the first two episodes do little to inspire more than a shrug. The Romanoffs that populate these episodes may believe themselves to be descended from royalty, but the series is entirely too common.

The Romanoffs arrives on Amazon Prime Video on Friday the 12th of October.