When you’re telling a story (a novel, a play, a movie, etc.), from the very beginning you must aim at a satisfactory conclusion, a climax that justifies all the components in a consistent way.
The ending is so important that if it fails, the entire ship sinks, and that’s exactly what happened with “The Haunting of Hill House”.
SPOILERS ALERT!
The series is a story of ghosts, really evil ghosts, considering all the torment and suffering that they inflict to the entire Crain family, not to mention to the previous families that inhabited the mansion where the traumatic events occur.
Since the first episode, it’s clear that the main source of evil is The House itself, hungry of souls even beyond its own physical boundaries. The House provokes a severe mental illness in Olivia Crain, that derives in her suicide and subsequent traumas on her husband and their five children through their childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. The younger and most tormented girl, Shirley, also commits suicide, but soon we realize she was murdered by the ghosts.
But when the final battle between the remaining Crains and The House is set up, after a very clever path of nine episodes, for no reason at all The House turns itself in a sort of supernatural psychologist that allows them to confront their respective weaknesses, awakening everyone’s inner voice in order to overcome their issues before it can grab and kill them one by one. So that, suddenly the series turns in a personal growth speech.
That’s a serious inconsistency, but not the only one.
Having the absolute power on his side, The House (through Olivia) make an agreement with Hugh Crain, the father, who is willing to give himself in exchange for the four siblings. The House frees the siblings, which is quite absurd considering that The House could easily have taken all of them without resistance.
And finally, for no reason at all, The House ends being a place where ghosts live happily ever after.
Really, I don’t know what the producers wanted to do, but whatever it was, it killed the series.
