Halloween watch: The Haunting of Hill House remains Netflix’s most beautiful, saddest horror series, years on

‘It’s a twin thing.’

Netflix has rarely produced a more tragic figure than Nell Crain, played with heartbreaking brilliance by Victoria Pedretti. She is a woman hunted all her life: By the darkness that clung to her family, and by the Bent-Neck Lady, the spectre that has stalked her since childhood.

And then, the revelation slips in, as she veers towards her own death. it lands like a blow and then, you really understand Nell, and just like her family, you learn it's too late to do so.

It’s one of many revelations from The Haunting of Hill House that still sears years later. The ghosts are real enough, but they are not what frightens most. The true terror is a family coming apart, and the cracks between siblings that never heal long after their loved ones are gone. The series is steeped in grief and guilt, and in the way memory can slowly tear a person apart and compel you to forget things that you never want to remember.

Grief, is a kind of horror that never leaves you alone.

The show is often mistaken for a story about a family that moves into a haunted house, one of horror’s most tired setups. The house does have its spectres. It is the house that slowly undoes Olivia Crain, the mother, played by a superb Carla Gugino, until she loses her grip on herself and on her children. On the family’s last night there, her husband Hugh makes a desperate choice to get the children out. It saves them, but he never fully explains it. His silence hardens into resentment, and that resentment curses his children’s adult lives.

The house is where the story begins, but the show is really about what the family carries out of it.

Years later, the scattered Crains are forced back together by Nell, the youngest, who had grown more broken and alone than any of them realised. Her siblings and father have to set aside decades of hostility for her sake. They failed to show up for her while she was alive, so in death they try to make amends. That is the cruel irony at the centre of the show: Nell becomes the glue that holds the family together only once she is gone.

Nobody feels her absence more than her twin, Luke. The two share a bond so intense it borders on the uncomfortable. Each feels the other’s pain physically, as if their nervous systems were wired together. In one jarring scene, Luke rambles feverishly about feeling cold and clammy and being unable to move his legs. Seconds later, the reason becomes clear.

He has felt Nell die.

Even as the family battles the literal horrors of Hill House, the series never lets you forget the human ones: the fractures, regrets and betrayals that haunt the Crains as surely as any ghost. In the end, the monster they most need to face is the guilt each of them has carried out of it. They have to forgive themselves for being selfish, for not listening when their sister needed them most, and, in Hugh’s case, for staying silent about the truth when it might have spared his children years of pain.

The house knows this, too. Its most sinister trick is the Red Room, which the siblings eventually realise has shown each of them, all their lives, whatever they most wanted: A playroom, a reading nook, a dance studio, a treehouse. It never scared them away It fed on what they wanted. That is the show’s sharpest idea: the house doesn’t create the Crains’ wounds, it finds the ones they already have.

So the finale’s resolution is: Letting one go. Hugh finally gives his children the truth, and gives Luke a future by choosing to stay behind with Olivia. Nell, now at peace, comforts her siblings rather than haunting them. She tells them she is “sprinkled over your lives like confetti”, scattered through every moment they shared rather than lost. It’s a line that turns grief into something almost gentle: she is gone, and also everywhere.

This is horror that makes you cry as often as it makes you flinch. The storytelling is so precise that the most devastating moments are not the jump-scares but the lines of dialogue, and the show earns every one of them. It leaves you with grief, then catharsis, and finally a story that stays lodged in your chest.