Wait... so was your username a lie this entire time?

"TRAUMA ISN'T A CONTEST, AND THERE'S NO WINNER" took me years to accept that. BE KIND TO YOURSELVES, EVERYBODY.

The Bent neck lady RUINED me. I still can't stop thinking about it and it feels like I was forever ago that I watched it

What makes the “None of you could see me.” Line more heartbreaking is that it was true for adult Nell while she was alive. None of her siblings really took time out to be concerned about her after her husband’s passing or thought about her mental health issues. When she calls them they all ignore her. Also what Hugh says in Two Storms about her always asking “Santa” for gifts for her siblings but never herself. He also said as she got older she still sent him letters and always talked about how her siblings were doing never herself. Olivia encouraged Nell’s selflessness as a child, but as I saw someone say once, Nell took that as having no self. She never looked out for herself but did for others. It’s a crime this show didn’t get any Emmy nominations, but it’s a crime against humanity especially that Victoria Pedretti didn’t get one.

Mike Flanagan just posted on his new tumblr account that he watched this video, and borrowed the poem you referenced for use in Midnight Club. Mike Flanagan watched and enjoyed your video. If you didn't already know, I had to come and tell you, because I think I'd die of joy in your situation.

“Honey, We Traumatized the Kids” i’m terrible for laughing

"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That's all; the rest is confetti." This quote makes me cry every time.

What I found really sad about Nell’s ending was that, presumably, she would never be reunited with her husband in the afterlife. She gets to be reunited with her parents and that’s nice(-ish), but she was just so devastated by his loss that I can’t really be happy about her being trapped in hill house for all eternity. And plus it’s not even like her mom’s ghost reverted back to her pre-insanity personality, this is still the lady who straight up murdered her

Sometimes I think people conflate hating a character with being frustrated with that character. Steven is very frustrating, but he’s also understandable and sympathetic.

I think one important little thing people miss Is Luke's seven keeps you safe. At the very end when hes by the cake with everyone around him there are seven people there. I thought that was a very well thought out moment

Also Olivia's eyes in that last scene sent literal shivers down my spine. Carla Gugino did a phenomenal job.

Okay but can we talk about how Shirley's guilt and grief drive her to try to patch things up and make them be Okay when they can't be, and how she *absolutely* takes after Hugh in that way? When she says, "I'm gonna fix you," an echo of Hugh's "I can fix this", and you realize that she's desperately trying to undo her failures and taking *way* too much on for herself and ultimately making everything worse just like Hugh did, it's *gutting.*

“i loved you completely, and you loved me the same, that’s all. the rest is confetti” makes me cry EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. including the end of this video so thanks for that.

I will never forget the end of the 5th episode as long as I live. The bent neck lady revelation was absolutely H O R R I F Y I N G

Can we acknowledge how amazing the kid actors were in this? It was honestly stunning

For some reason I never thought of Steven as the main character, but I don’t hate him honestly, none of them are bad characters or people

A really tragic detail about Nell’s ghost’s costume design in the final episode is the necklace. Because it was the noose in disguise. Shackling her to Hill House. Oof

that "I was right here the entire time, no one could see me" line is heartbreaking, that scene brings tears to my eyes...both actresses playing Nell delivered an incredible performance, and by the end of the show I didn't feel scared of the Bent-neck Lady, I just felt sorry for Nell.

Other thing from "The Twin Thing": The reason Nell has a bruise on her face in the morgue is because Luke got beat up.

When Nell is describing how time is nonlinear, I thought back to the storms, and it's a stretch, I know, but when Nell couldn't be found during the storm in their childhood, i couldn't help but think that the two timelines were occuring at the same time. they couldn't find nell because she was already dead during the second storm. You can't be seen if you dont exist anymore. That whole episode broke my heart lol

That was a wonderful video essay, thanks so much. I just finished this show and wanted to live in it more and discuss it with someone and this really did that for me.

These are my favorite things about the show: 1) When Steve sees Nell's ghost in ep. 1, she's wearing the same outfit she wore when she confronted him at the book reading (the last time Steve saw her alive). When Luke sees Nell's ghost after she died, she's wearing the same outfit she wore when she bought drugs for him (the last time Luke saw her alive). And the jumpscare in ep. 8? She was wearing her wedding dress (from what I could tell) which was what she was wearing the last time Theo and Shirley saw her alive together. 2) It takes Luke seven steps to get from his bed to Nell's 3) Each time Luke saw Nell's ghost, she said "go" and "don't" which is what young Nell told him in his near-death red room vision. 4) Literally all of ep. 6 5) How the two beds in Luke's (I know, Luke again) vision turned into one 6) That the Dudleys gave up their religion and belief of Heaven and God to stay in the house with Abigail. 7) All the new things and foreshadowing you notice the second, third, fifth time watching it

alternate reading: all the Crain females had gifts or were "sensitive". the mother Olivia mentioned that their grandmother too was the same. Olivia herself had "deja-vus", but they were more like flashbacks, & dream /waking visions. following her mother, Shirley's ability was also linked to the subconcious. she only had premonitions in her sleep, through sleeptalking. but my guess is that whatever latent abilities she had, she suppressed them as a way to "fix" it. which explains her career choice of "fixing" the effects of death. something powerful that she can control & contain. Theo's power was the most obvious, which helped her get to Truth. this also shaped her professional pursuit as a child psychologist, to help them by seeing the truth behind their traumas. Nell was actually the most powerful of the Crain women. her gift was Clarity. she claimed the house was "loud" when they first moved in, before anything started happening. in her letters to Santa as a child, she was able to dictate all the things her siblings needed, even the stuff her parents were not aware of. the house knew this from day one and reprogrammed her the night of the storm where she was unseen by the rest of her family. it successfully set the tone for her life - to dull her clarity. society, her family, prescriptive drugs did the rest. why is she the most powerful? because as she hanged from the noose, her death was the biggest moment of clarity for her. it was like waking up, as her mother put it. she was so powerful that at full clarity, she was able to go back psionically to try to warn herself. this was a feat she managed to do stretching the fabric of space and time. that was the (full?) magnitude of her power, and the house wanted it the moment it saw her.

I never realized that Luke was feeling Nell’s death all through that episode. Great catch.

We all remember the iconic line "If you upsetti... have some confetti."

WTF I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE THATS WHAT WAS HAPPENING DURING LUKE’S EPISODE. I thought he was cold due to exposure to the elements but it makes SO MUCH SENSE. Damn. That’s sad.

Does anyone else think that while Nell looks devastated as she hugs Hugh, Olivia just stares straight at Steven and looks...hungry.

OMG the actor that plays Young Nell just kills me. her performance is just "Perfectly Splendid"

Watching it again made me realize that the reason why Luke was able to finally get clean was because Nell stopped taking her medication. She sacrificed her mental health for his recovery. 😭

F'n hell.... the whole plot with little Nell, "I was right here, none of you could see me." just broke me heart. Possibly because I'm also the youngest child, and while not as dramatically, I think it's a psychological battle we live with for the rest of our lives. No one listens to the littlest one. And our inputs are rarely taken seriously. Even growing into adulthood, forging our own lives and creating our own accomplishments, there's always that little voice from years of not being heard. I ended that episode in absolute tears.

Luke triggers my "I can fix him" mentality. Hate that for me.

I feel like Shirley got the short end of the stick writing wise - the cheating was a pretty uninspired ghost imo, and I found her sleep-talking interesting, it seemed to hint that she had powers too, but we never see more of that. I understand she might've suppressed her power but I think her character needed more depth

There is a mirror in hill house that reflects nellie as she is dancing alone, the mirror is the one from oculus. Another easter egg from Mike Flanagan

“Maybe the real friends we made were the traumas along the way.” Mood

I think a big reason why I personally dislike Steve is because I see myself in him and all the things I dislike about him, I dislike about myself. I, like him, am the oldest sibling of a gaggle of kids who experienced severe traumas growing. I was looked at as a mini parent by them and by our rotating cast of guardians. After a while, I rejected that responsibility and became callous and uncaring towards the struggles of my siblings. Steve did the same thing. I hate that I did that and I hate who it made me, so I also hate him. I hate him in a way not many people can hate him because it's deeply personal. HOWEVER, I also heavily empathize with him. He's an asshole, but I get it. It just doesn't make it okay. (Sidenote: Thank you KZfaq recommendations for recognizing my desire for another channel that does video essays)

This series was like a character study in human grief. Shirley has her moments but the scene where she’s pulling the organs out of Nell and she says “ I’m elbow deep in our sisters body cavity and you have to get two grown men to an airport, get it done” I had so much respect for her cause her and Theo get shit done.

“The Epitaph” poem was used at the end of The Midnight Club also by Mike Flanagan!

I'm sooooo glad Flanagan didn't go with the red room twist ending. I mean it's basically the exact same ending as Inception. And it didn't even work in that movie, it was a cheap way of making Christopher Nolan look smart, that just left most people without a clue what Nolan was trying to say? Leaving them all in the red room and sending the message that resolution to trauma and conflict only happens in our delusions--that would've seriously tarnished the message of the show.

The way Ghost Olivia looks at Steve over Hugh’s shoulder during that hug sends shivers up my spine.

Not that you "missed" it because it wasn't a main point of the story so I don't think you would have gone into it anyways, but I really loved that Theo's monologue after Nell scares her and Shirley off the road was one of the most perfect descriptions of clinical depression I've ever heard. Nell clearly suffered from depression, and that monologue did an amazing job of using the literal wondering of "is there nothing left when we die?" as a parallel to how you feel when you suffer from depression. It's not just "sadness" like a lot of people who haven't experienced real depression think. It's an overwhelming apathy, a suffocating feeling of nothingness, that causes you to question why you are even alive. And as someone who's felt this kind of depression before, Theo's last line in the monologue: "That through fucking shame was so much better than that horrible empty nothing" is one of the most impactful lines in the show (shoutout to Kate Segal for her incredible acting as well). When you feel that level of depression, honestly you would even trade it for horrible feelings like deep sorrow, shame or guilt because as bad as those make you feel, they still feel better than the nothingness that comes with depression.

The bent neck lady revelation made me actually pause and walk away. I've lost both my parents and I've never really been able to fully come to terms with their passing even though it was in 2013 (my dad, to gangrene) and 2015 (my mom, stage 4 cancer) it just hurt and left me feeling like I had an empty, gaping hole in me. The show actually ended up helping me talk to my therapist about the trauma of losing them so quickly and how much it hurts. So, I have a morosely dramatic horror show to thank for getting me to finally talk about how I was afraid to grieve.

That red room scene was perfect. Nells monologue is so good. And her forgiving her siblings really hit a chord with me. Often when someone commits suicide people around them feel guilty for not somehow preventing it. Nell was able to save them from that guilt, and I think without the guilt the house didnt really have an emotion to feed on any more. Thus by saving her siblings from their guilt she saved them from the house.

Haunting of Hill house is like "I want more but I had enough but I want more". I guess i just want more of it's greatness

I was never sure that Olivia consciously realized that her plan would kill her kids, because she seemed somewhat convinced that she and the twins needed to wake up. It reminded me of Inception, where Mal became unable to tell when she was in a dream and tried to wake herself up without realizing that she was already awake. I think Olivia sort of knew what she was doing with the rat poison but also believed that this was all just a dream, so it wouldn't actually harm the kids because it wasn't real. Remember, she believed that Hugh was the one who was going to kill the kids, when she chased after them to prevent Hugh from taking the kids away from the house. She thought Hugh was going to kill the kids and wanted to rescue them. Which might just make this more tragic...And the scene between Hugh and Olivia's ghost at the end reminded me of Marlin and Dory in Finding Nemo, when Marlin tells Dory that he'd promised that nothing would ever happen to Nemo and Dory points out that that means nothing would ever happen to Nemo at all. It was a weird connection to make.

Nell’s final speech really helps cope with grief, or as Andrew Garfield said, “our unexpressed love”. The missed calls, the chances you’ll never get back, they all suck. But there were times you still picked up the phone, the time you still spent with your loved one, and the grief you feel towards losing that loved one. That time you gave to them matters more than the ones you missed.

I actually do think this show holds onto some of those early feminist themes: if both Olivia and Nell had been listened to and believed, it's possible they'd still be alive, which makes their deaths all the more tragic. That anxiety of not being truly seen is still there, I think especially for Olivia. It's not empowering, like you say, but I do still think it's a concern the show is dealing with.

This show came out around when my father died. I understand the criticism against the show from a feminist perspective, but as a girl with an extremely complicated relationship with her dad where our one major point of bonding was over our love of horror movies, this show felt tailor made to get me to understand my own grief and actually cry unbidden over how my father died alone and in pain and it took days for him to be discovered and that all I wanted to hear from him is that he was proud to have been *my* dad. I love horror because it’s the genre best suited to face and talk about things that are painfully intimate and we can’t bring ourselves to speak plainly about because they’re too close to ourselves. I really love this show for how it helped me and I’m glad I’m not alone in that.

I didnt realize it has been 5 years since this show came out. I absolutely loved it when it came out and havent stopped thinking about it. But I forgot just how much this show *wrecked* me. Just watching these clips make me cry. Mike Flanagan's works are so impactful. I'd love to see a video essay on his new series The Fall of the House of Usher.

I love that the cracking on the bent neck lady’s skin and dress mimicked the pattern of the black mold on the wall.

I just remembered that the father Hugh told Steven smth along the lines of: 'I read your book, and you have seen ghosts, too. The man you saw fix the clock? There was no man. The Tree house you played in with luke? There was no tree house.' At the end we realize that the treehouse was the red room all along. And that's crazy to me, bc I didn't really get that the first time. Really good series!

That entire last chapter in this video choked me up and put tears in my eyes, gods, ouch, oof, good job, I need to go hug my friend now thank you

"face your demons" "NOT YOUR ACTUAL DEMONS"

You can’t understand Shirley or Steven until you’ve been the older sibling who HAS to hold it all together while processing your own trauma. Cause if you look away too long who knows what trouble the younger ones will get into. Which they do cause they took their eyes off them.

I sobbed like a freaking baby throughout Nell's monologue. It changed me as a person. My mom died a year ago while I was holding her hand and let me just tell you, I have never seen as realistic and raw and truth-to-life representation of how grief feels like as this show. This whole thing is a masterpiece of portraying the most difficult and complex emotions that exist. Beautiful thing and you did it absolute justice with your analysis. Thank you.

what broke me into tears the first time watching this was learning about Luke’s reason for counting from 1-7, and that, his family, knowing they’re there is keeping him grounded, and I’m literally tearing up thinking about this right now

This is like the 5th time I watch this video and it's now that I realize what it means that in episode 6 everyone but Nell's corpse is in blue, whereas she's in red. In a video analysis by Hue Hues, he pointed out how blue (associated with Hugh) symbolized reality whereas red (associated with Olivia) symbolized the red door and fantasy. Therefore, while the dead Nell is trapped in the world of the red door (red funeral dress) , the rest of the family are still in reality (blue clothes). Another interesting thing to think about are the pink nightgowns Olivia and Nell wore when they died. It can be read not only as a visual connection between them, but also as a symbol of the threshold to the red room's world. Pink, as the lighter version of red (fantasy), is like the last step before falling into the abyss in multiple ways, no pun intended. And it's not just because the 2 women wore pink when they died, but also because Nell keeps wearing the pink dress after death while Olivia dons the red dressing gown. Olivia has completely succumbed to the fantasy of Hill House and become a manifestation of the red room. However, because Nell managed to regain sense right before she died and realized what was really happening, she didn't completely succumb to that lure. Therefore, she might be in a perpetual threshold between reality and fantasy that prevents her from becoming like Olivia's spirit and helps save her siblings. And since Hugh willingly sacrificed his life for his kids, his realistic mind (symbolized by his blue clothes), however broken by grief it became through the years, will also prevent him from becoming like Olivia. He's not crazy despite what he looks like to outsiders, he's fully aware that his mental Olivia is just that, a coping mechanism in his mind. He never let's go of his reality, just extends it to include the ghosts of Hill House.

Shirley's desperation to "fix" things mirrors her dad's certainty he can fix things, an echo which hurt my heart when I recognized it.

I've watched this show three times now and I still can't stop the tears. Hugh's line about holding the door shut with both arms outstretched but having no arms left to hold his children tears at me. I think about this show all the time

The video's ending is as beautiful as the ending of the series.

Massive W to Mike for coming out and unambiguously saying “yes, this is a happy ending. Yes, it had to be that way. No, there’s no hidden darkness to it”. Which I love cuz I just know it made so many film theorists mad.

Thank you for listing the jump scare times in the description. Signed, an Autistic and easily startled viewer who only go through the whole show using the site Where's the Jump?

I dont thing Steve was the main protagonist. I never had the feeling anyone was the maincharacter because the story always puts someone different in the center.

This show is maybe the most surprisingly emotional thing I've ever seen. I came for the scares, I stayed for the OMG I JUST WANT THEIR FAMILY TO BE TOGETHER AND HAPPY PLEASE GOD WHY

This show was just unbelievable. I wish I could wipe my memory of it and watch it again for the first time. The horror elements are perfect the story being told is beautiful, tragic, haunting. I don’t think there will ever be a horror tv show as good as this ever again. Flanagan is a horror icon and the world is a better place with his work in it.

The way Nell says “Forgiveness is warm” is said in such a.. well, warm way, it starts the waterworks every time for me.

the one frame where you talk about the witness marks and how the children rationalize what happened in the house around 48:00 mark, the text says it would be great to hear how theo rationalizes them: i think she doesnt say because shes a middle child, she's literally in the middle. for luke and nel the events were so real that they literally haunted them in physical form of the ghosts well into adulthood, and for steve and shirley they were something that their brains made up. the age order of the kids lines them up from most denying to most directly affected, and theo is smack down in the middle. she has her powers so she cant completely deny the existence of supernatural but she hasnt been directly affected by ghost stuff so she cant 100% confirm it either. she's bargaining with herself how much of it was real, if you will.

57:56 "go" 58:02 "don't" Nell says "go" to Luke in the rehap center after she dies and Joey flees. Nell says "don't" to Luke at the cemetery right before Olivia tried to pull him into the grave.

Honestly sometimes I just watch this video when I need to cry. In the process of trying to get through grief, I return to this video, and it makes me cry every time.

gotta disagree that the show was "mainly" about steven, he was the author of the book about their whole lives but much of the show was about the female characters

I swear, the tall man who shows up in Luke's episode scared the shit out of me. It's rare I'm gripped with such terror as I was watching him float through the hallways and into their room.

And I'm crying about Hill House again. (I have more to say, but when I try to put it in words I just wanna start crying again. I'm glad we're seeing multiple shows tackling the different ways childhood trauma manifests in adulthood (Umbrella Academy being the other, which I could also write tomes about, but probably *could* actually write it b/c I'm not holding back sobs).) Wonderful analysis. I was about to go rewatch except it's 0144 & that is the worst idea. Love this video! Great job

I've watched this show 3 times now and every time Nell says "... the rest is confetti" i just start crying. this show is a masterpiece of storytelling.

A lot of this adaptation of Haunting of Hill House comes across as poetry to me. From the dialogue to the cinematography, editing etc etc… it’s all poetry. And not all of it is good, not everyone will like it- but overall it just… moves you. It has a message that speaks to your soul. It’s a shame that Haunting of Hill House wasn’t nominated for any Emmys. Just a shame.

The Mr. Smiley story is so horrific oh my god

I disagree that Steve was the center of the show. I would say that Olivia was. She was the heart of the family, kids' trauma revolves mainly around her. Olivia's death broke the family and their lives. Edit: Thanks for all the likes! On my third rewatch of the series I think now I understand why we start and end with Steve: as one of the replies mentioned, it's partly because the series go from eldest to youngest sibling. But also I think we start with the most skeptical sibling so that as Steve discovers that ghosts are real most people in the audience (who are, i believe, in our days and age don't really believe in ghosts) can discover in with him. So the series just makes a stronger connection with audience and hooks us up from the very beginning. But i still do not believe that Steve is the main protagonist.

It breaks my heart that so many of their last words to Nell are apologies. Cause that's what we all fear: having regrets, needing to make apologies to our loved ones when they pass. "What if that's the last thing you said to your [blank] before they died?" Wouldn't you be sorry? I'm not crying - YOU'RE crying!

One of my favorite aspects of the adaptation is the children’s psychic power. Obviously Theo’s is the strongest, but they ALL have it. Olivia says only the women have it but her sons do, the siblings say it’s a “twin thing” to account for Nell and Luke’s bond, but again it’s all of them. And then there’s Hugh, the only member of the family who truly doesn’t, but is after Olivia’s death so open to the house and to his uncanny children who won’t even talk to him. It’s so touching and heartbreaking, all of it. Also, Victoria Pedretti should have gotten an Emmy nomination for playing Nell. The noises she makes throughout the show, moans and whimpers while she clamps her mouth closed in an attempt to not truly cry, if you’ve ever witnessed someone in extreme grief, losing a loved one or having been betrayed by someone they truly trusted, that’s the sound you hear. Also, in the Luke episode, when he’s out on the streets everyone sees him and wrongly assumes he’s using opioids again. But he is in DTs, not for drugs but for Nell, literally the other half of his soul. It’s heart wrenching. The only moment that made me sob more than Nell’s death - the house making her believe she was with Arthur again - was the moment with Mr. Dudley carrying his dying wife to the house so she can be with her babies for eternity. That moment absolutely made me lose it.

Curse you for reminding me this existed and putting me through all the feels again

the final shot of Two Storms with Nell being left unseen and all alone had me bawling my eyes out like you would not believe. even now i'm starting to cry a little bit just seeing it again

"I've never seen a ghost" THE GANG SEES A GHOST

Yeah I never saw Steven as the main character. They all feel like the main characters in different moments. But Steven was never my least favorite character either. I love them all honestly

Please do a video essay of Bly Manor, I would love to see the comparisons. Personally I believe Hill house was a story of loss in family while Bly manor is more of loss in love.

I could LITERALLY write a book about this version of The Haunting of Hill House. Re: Steven - he's not my favorite of the kids, but I think he's got a really great character arc. In the first episode, when Hugh whisks him out of the house, Hugh tells him to close his eyes. And when they're driving away from the house, Hugh is telling the kids not to look back and Steven is the ONLY ONE who does. Then, when they return at the end of the series, Hugh tells Steven to look at him to divert his attention from the Bowler Hat ghost. At every turn, Steven is being told to look away from the horrors happening around him, to act like they don't exist. And he literally learned it from his dad. So the fact that he wrote the book at all is strikingly brave of him - considering how everyone reacted, it was the one time he actually tried to LOOK back at what happened because he's being told not to look back, but he knows it's unresolved. And then, once he knows the truth from Hugh, and has come to peace with the house, he can leave this time WITHOUT looking back because he's finally put all the ghosts of Hill House behind him for good. Also re: the proto-feminist themes of the original book - I have some, ahem, unpopular opinions. As much as I'm here for the themes of repressed femininity, I don't think a "faithful" adaptation of Jackson's book would have really worked in the modern day, just because the portrayals of those themes as they were depicted in the original text are fairly outdated in terms of moder feminist discourse. BUT I'd argue that the series still maintains the same collection of themes and clearly understands the book incredibly well. Book!Eleanor isn't just representative of repressed 1950s femininity, but she's also the anxious outcome of a lifetime of abuse at the hands of her late mother and her sister. Both are shown to have been extremely verbally and emotionally abusive to her (and potentially physically in the case of her mother.) So she is so deeply insecure and desperate for real love but also terrified whenever any affection is shown to her. Throughout the book, she's dealing with the trauma of her abusive upbringing, and projecting her skewed expectations and assumptions onto the other characters. She's simultaneously desperate for the approval and attention of Theo and Dr. Montague and Luke, but terrified that any attention they give her is simply "mocking" her or insincere - hence, why she's always so anxious to speak and always feels unseen by the others. And in the moments that she is assured of their sincerity, she's suddenly jealous of their relationships with one another and terrified that they'll abandon her. Book!Eleanor ends up totally enamoured with the house because it's mind games are a substitute for the psychological abuse of her late mother. It's been normalized for her, which is why everyone else is scared of what happens in the house, while Eleanor EMBRACES it. It's her "home" because her only measurement of "home" is a constant turmoil of familial abuse. Everyone else can see it, except for Eleanor, to the point that she believes that when they're sending her away from the house for her safety, they're ACTUALLY doing it because they hate her. Her world-view has become so warped by her own trauma that she ends up self-destructing and killing herself because she literally cannot believe that these people care for her. And I think Flanagan does an INCREDIBLE job at conveying all of those themes - the way that family trauma makes people self-destruct, the complicated nature of abusive and erratic parents and their children's relationships with them, the nature of mental illness, Nell's inability to be seen or heard because of her own experiences as well as her feelings of isolation even when she's with people who DO love her, the ways that we let each other down even when we don't mean to, the ways that people ignore these problems until it's too late, and that sometimes trauma can completely consume families (like that more-bitter-than-sweet moment with the Dudleys, where their inability to move beyond their trauma means that the house manages to take them all.) And then he gives Nell a cathartic ending. She's not just consumed by the house and her own trauma like she is at the end of book, but she gets to come to peace with the fact that her siblings DID care for her as she cared for them, even if they couldn't always give each other what they needed. And that it's possible for people to heal from their traumas and move forward with their lives. We've seen a million tragic horror stories where people are destroyed by their traumas, particularly in the cycles of family traumas. So I deeply admire Flanagan for understanding the source material, while giving those people who have been through trauma hope that they aren't just doomed to self-destruct, but that they have the ability to heal and grow. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Storytime: I watch the whole series with my family. Every Saturday we would join in the living room and watch 1 or 2 episodes at a time, in the last months this has been the highlight of my week. When it came for the finale I was weeping. HARD. I was not expecting that reaction for me and neither did my family. When it finished, we turn on the lights and they just.. hug me. They let me cry my eyes out and stayed there with me with hugging me and letting me know without words that they were there and that it was okay.. which make me weeping 1000x more.. but in a good way. So just wanna say.. thank you. If it wasn't for your video I wouldn't had the bravery to watch it in the first place (I'm just a scary cat like you)

Mike Flanagan just used “Epitaph” by Merrit Malloy in ‘Midnight Club’-I know it must’ve been due to someone in the writers room seeing this video! The poem fit nicely into the context of the show, but I’ll always associate it with the confetti monologue from HoHH…

I keep being astonished at how perfectly cast childhood Shirley is. She looks so much like the adult counterpart and was a very good actor compared to a lot of other child actors (including some of the others in the same series cough cough)

You are the most underrated youtuber I know. You put so much gorgeous work into your videos, and every minute is a delight. I got so many chills watching this. I really hope you keep making videos and people appreciate you more as time goes on. Thanks for doing what you do.

The strongest feeling I got from this show as the message that we're all haunted by something, and to rob our ghosts of their power we have to face them. Only then can we start to recover from what hurts us. I'm a baby about certain kinds of horror, and this show initially scared me badly enough to cut into my sleep for a couple weeks. But once I was finished with it, I felt rewarded for making it through. The story is rich, and the ghosts aren't as scary by the end. Mostly I just want to give every one of these hurt characters a hug, because goddamn the actors are so good at making me believe these people are real.

im so glad they didnt add the window at the end. it ended on 7 family members again, they built back things they had lost :(

Now we only wait for "The Hunting Of Bly Menor" video.

I binged all of The Haunting of Hill House during over like two days in my senior year of college. I was up all day and all night, and when my roommate left to do janitorial duty on campus at 4AM she told me that if I was still awake when she got home at 7, she would physically rip the TV off the wall. I sobbed so hard during the ending that i gave myself a sleep-deprivation migraine and crawled into bed as my roommate walked through the door. It was the best night of my senior year.

This is genuinely one of the only video essays I’ve seen on KZfaq that’s actually substantive and not just someone talking a lot and saying very little.

I had no idea people disliked Steven lol. I think he’s a solid character. He grows as a person. He does some shitty things, but all the characters do. They’re all deeply human.

I got to be a back ground actor for the book store scene where Nell confronts Stephen and omg, yes Victoria is amazing!!!

When you credited Victoria Pedretti with acting chops in the scene of her husband's death I remembered where I knew her from. She plays the "love" interest in the second season of "You" and her acting mesmerized me from the first second she was on screen. She's able to convey real emotion with just a look or a word... She's going places.

hey! i came back to this essay because i just finished watching the midnight club and i KNOW i heard the epitaph before somewhere and i remembered you! you make such brilliant videos that i never skipped a single ad bcs u deserve so much and more. thank you for making these, they are so worth the hours. oh, and may i suggest another netflix series? it's a german drama called dark and it spans for 3 seasons and is just *chef's kiss*. i think you'll like it. more power to you queen 💖

That "I was here the whole time" scene had me welling up even in this video. Well over a year after watching this show. Holy crap this show did a number on my feels, wasn't expecting such a fast re-surfacing of that 😭

I cried watching this review so I can only imagine what the actual show will do to me and I can’t wait

As someone who was traumatized by the Nightmare before Christmas as a child, I felt that intro in my bones. Thanks for the continuous amount of amazing content,

My marker for a good video essay is when it's able to make me cry over a movie/show I've never seen before. Truly remarkable. Thank you.