This Is Still the Scariest Episode of The Haunting of Hill House

Mike Flanagan is known for being a modern staple in horror film and television storytelling. He has a solid list of projects under his belt, including some of the best adaptations of Stephen King‘s work. His first show for Netflix, The Haunting of Hill House, was not his writing or directorial debut, but the 2018 streaming series did jump-start his career and quickly put Flanagan on the horror map. Based on the 1959 gothic horror novel by Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House tells the story of the Crain family through two different periods. As the story follows the haunted family members and the mysterious death of Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino) when they lived at Hill House, the series showcased Flanagan’s ability to intertwine scares with emotional drama expertly. Each episode contains plenty of terrifying moments, but one episode unnervingly burrows under your skin.

Episode 9, “Screaming Meemies,” sets up the audience for The Haunting of Hill House finale by finally revealing what happened to Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino) as her mental health deteriorated into madness, as well as how she died. As Hill House torments the Crain matriarch, dream and reality become a blur to Olivia as she is forced to face her worst nightmares and possibly become another dark entity shaped by the sinister forces of the house.

Hill House is full of ghosts, causes hallucinations, and exists within its own time, capable of showing events that haven’t yet passed. Olivia’s madness is partly brought on by being assaulted with visions of her dead adult children. At one point, Hill House takes her to the future, where Nell (Victoria Pedretti) lies dead in the morgue. Olivia then sees the grown-up version of Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) dead from an overdose on the floor. She’s immediately confronted by the terrifying image of her deceased daughter sitting up and cutting open the metal wiring in her mouth to scream, “Mommy!” with lifeless, milky eyes.

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The sequence is terrifying partially due to the disturbing emotional aspect of the scene in that this is a mother seeing two of her children dead. Olivia’s greatest fear is of something happening to her kids, and Hill House is using that against her to influence her and ultimately break Olivia down until she’s mentally so unwell she’s prepared to commit filicide.

Soon after, Olivia has a “dream” where one of the ghosts of Hill House, Poppy Hill (Katie Parker), reveals how her own children died in terrible ways; this works to spur on Olivia’s desperate need to protect her kids through deadly methods. Poppy tries to pass their deaths off as bad dreams (or “screaming meemies”) and monologues that in order to protect her children from bad dreams, she would “wake them up” to keep them safe. Olivia wakes up to find herself straddling her husband Hugh (Henry Thomas) in bed, holding a screwdriver to his throat.

We watch helplessly as Olivia is slowly but surely broken down piece by piece by Hill House and its mind games, attempting to drive her to murder her children. Her hallucinations even include a scene where the young twins, Nell and Luke, tell their mother, “You send us out there into the dark, and the dark gets us, a piece at a time, over years and years and years” until they’re dead — all in the haunted house’s effort to talk Olivia into killing the youngest Crains to “protect” them. Or, as Poppy and the hallucination of young Nell darkly put it, Olivia would “wake them up.”

It’s unsettling for the audience to know that “waking up” actually means murder, but there’s nothing we can do to warn Olivia or the Crains as Hill House tries to consume them. In Olivia’s case, it succeeds. Under the pressure of insinuations that her twins are going to suffer when they grow up, and the relentless nightmares, visions, and manipulations, Olivia eventually cracks. It is gut-wrenching and upsetting watching Olivia taking the twins from their beds in the middle of the night under the guise of play, all the while the audience is fully aware she’s about to murder them. The young Crains are spared this time, but Hill House manages to take an unexpected victim when Olivia poisons and kills Luke’s friend Abigail (who everyone believed was imaginary) after she is shockingly revealed to be the very real daughter of the Dudleys.

Prominent horror elements and a couple of jump scares contribute to this episode’s scariness, but beyond the fear a parent might experience over harm coming to their child, it’s the themes of losing one’s mind, losing control, being manipulated, and the complete isolation that stems from them all that really makes this episode terrifying.

The fear of our minds betraying us is a relatable one, as is the feeling of aloneness that comes with mental illness. Witnessing the cataclysmic event that tore apart the Crain family is maybe not as visually terrifying as The Bent-Neck Lady, but seeing Olivia’s final days of life and the way she suffered in the ghostly grip of Hill House — resulting in a child’s blood on her hands and forced suicide — is far more viscerally haunting.

The Haunting of Hill House is available to stream on Netflix.