Fridge / The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

Trailers

• The music in the trailer is a creepily slow, piano-only version of "Our House (Is a Very Very Very Fine House)".

In-Series

• Crossing over with Twin Telepathy: In episode 4, the reason Luke keeps rubbing at the left side of his neck after that night, why he's feeling like he can't get warm and like his joints and limbs are all stiff is because Nell is dead of a broken neck and her spirit has been trapped by Hill House.
  • Similarly, in episode 2 we see marks all over Nell's face when Shirley is cleaning her up, despite episode 5 showing she died of a straight drop. However, they perfectly correlate with the marks on Luke's face from being beaten up.
• Luke is desperate to help Joey to the point he’ll steal from family and ignore the signs that she is not really committed to being helped. He probably unconsciously sees Abigail in her - another friend of his no one believed in (more literally in her case) who he had to watch die of poisoning.
• The House needs weakness or sensitivity to prey on to manipulate its victims. The children are all young and impressionable, so all of them are in its sway. Olivia is sensitive to the paranormal. As an adult, Luke is only snagged by the House after seeing Nell for the first time, distracting him. Of all the Crains, only Hugh, who is an adult with a strong, practical mind, is relatively unscathed. His lone concession to the House is a willing, rational and calculated bargain to protect his kids.
• In episode 3, Theo has a vision/nightmare of Mr. Smiley pulling off her blankets while she sleeps, which is terrifying enough on its own, but then we learn that Mr. Smiley is actually her patient's way of compartmentalizing her foster father's sexual abuse; he would come to her bedroom at night, and would probably begin his abuse by removing her blankets.
• One of the photos of Kelsey and her foster father shows him smiling and her with a blank expression. He's later revealed to be Mr. Smiley, her tormentor. Also, if you pause the screen on Kelsey's drawing of her family, you can see that Rich's right eye is twice the size of his left. Just like Mr. Smiley.
• Luke's speech in Liv's vision about "putting poison in himself" initially just seems like an appropriately childlike metaphor for his future heroin addiction. Then, in the final episode, the House compels him to literally inject rat poison into his veins.
• Steve is criticized by several family members for getting details wrong in his original The Haunting of Hill House book. In the end, we learn that the kids were experiencing the House differently, so their stories would never match up no matter how accurately Steve wrote them.
• In episode 9, Poppy says that she loves what Olivia did with the room, and then mentions that "it was a dressing room for me, then a nursery." At first it can be easily written off as Poppy describing how she set up the room herself, until you realize the wording... she's telling Olivia what the Red Room turned itself into for her.
  • Turns into Fridge Horror when it's revealed that the Red Room is the houses's stomach and by turning itself into a nursery tricked Poppy into leaving her children inside of it for long periods of time.
• In episode 5, Shirley mutters in her sleep: "dancing in the red room." This is not a future prediction as it first appears: it is a very, very early hint as to the nature of the Red Room, because for Theo, it was a dance studio.
• In the show's first episode, we hear narration from Steve's Hill House book, describing the environment as dark and for the lack of a better word, haunting, and with themes of logic, ending with the line "And those who walk there, walk alone". However, in the show's last episode, the season closes with a similar narration but instead discusses the power of love and ending with the line "And those who walk there, walk together". The season begins and ends with Steve's Hill House book to show how in the beginning, he was alone as he had isolated those he loved and was in denial that any hauntings happened on the final night at Hill House, however by the end of the season, not only does Steve understand the truth of what happened on the final night at Hill House, he is finally not alone and is with his family, something it took long enough for him to realize.
• Theo's encounter with "Mr. Smiley" is a metafictional reference to the "Whose Hand Was I Holding?" scene in the original The Haunting - in that scene, Eleanor hears the sound of a child being abused while noticing a sinister face in the wallpaper near to her. It's signposted by the beginning of the episode, when Theo says the same line after waking up from a bad dream.
• In every one of the children's flashbacks of the night they fled Hill House, we see that Hugh went back for Steven last and that the first children he had with him while organizing the flight were the twins. Theo, the third child Hugh evacuates, encountered Hugh and the twins in the foyer after leaving her bedroom, with Hugh and the twins entering the foyer from the hallway that leads to the side of the house with the parlor and spiral staircase, as seen in the second episode—the opposite end of the house from the children's bedrooms, where Theo came from, meaning the twins and Hugh came from somewhere other than the twins' bedroom. As adults, all the children show hostility or resentment towards their father for not explaining that night except Nell, who wrote to him every month after they were seperated and still calls him for emotional support, and Luke, who talks peacefully, if awkwardly, with Hugh during their reunion at the vigil and funeral and never shouts at Hugh like the other surviving children about their lack of understanding. Initially this appears to simply be because Nell was the most openly affectionate sibling and Luke has too many of his own problems to yell at someone for theirs, but once you get to Hugh's and Olivia's episodes, it becomes clear that these were early hints that Luke and Nell were in fact present during the incident that instigated the flight from Hill House.
  • As adults Nell and Luke are the most psychologically frail siblings, with Nell suffering from depression and Luke from drug addiction. Their siblings tend to look down on them for this or write off their issues as an inherited predisposition, but there's a good environmental explanation for their frailty that the others don't know about: unlike their older siblings, Nell and Luke had to live with the knowledge of what really happened that night from the age of six and couldn't talk to anyone about it, since Abigail's death and their mother's attempt to kill them was kept a secret and the twins were seperated from their father, the only adult with whom they could talk about it. They were obliged not to tell anyone, a commitment they maintained so thoroughly that the truth of what they went through doesn't even show up in their own focus episodes.
• Of course Steven is willing to get his vasectomy reversed after the finale—he now knows that the Hill House tragedy was not the result of mental illness, let alone a hereditary one that he could pass on to his children, so it's "safe" for him to father a child. He also needs an heir to take on the role of Secret-Keeper and continue protecting Hill House after his death.

Fridge Horror

• In Episode 10, as Hugh embraces Nell and Liv in the Red Room, Nell is the only one hugging him with closed eyes. Olivia on the other hand keeps her eyes locked on Steve as the Red Room's door closes, implying she still wants her kids to die and be with her, despite the fact they'll all be trapped in Hill House forever.
  • A more sympathetic interpretation of her stare could be that Olivia is watching Steve walk away, knowing that she'll never see him, or any of her living children, again.
• Mrs. Dudley mentions that Abigail must have escaped their house through a vent. This implies she kept her daughter in a room with no windows in order to protect her.
  • Alternatively, the windows could've just been too small or too high for her to get through.
  • Another, less creepy explanation is that she would have seen or heard if those were opened.
• The realisation, after Episode 10, that the spectral visions of Olivia experienced by the siblings - especially poor Nell - was not just the House trying to tempt them but Olivia herself. Especially when she sent Nell to die at exactly the same spot she did...
• The most unsettling horror of the series is that which is not shown. Key moments are cut off throughout - for instance, we never see exactly what the Tall Man did to Luke after discovering him under the bed - and an entire history was written for the previous inhabitants of the House but never filmed due to time and budgetary constraints. As a result, the ghosts all feel much more realised - and realistic...
• Poppy recites the rhyme "The Grattan Murders" to Hugh when advancing on him in the denouement of the show. Research shows that this rhyme is not in reference to any crime that occurred in Hill House, but is in the book, recited by the callous character Luke Sanderson. Further research shows that Shirley Jackson, an enthusiastic occultist, used to recite it to her children when they went to bed. And that it references a very real massacre. And that the rhyme is the sanitised version...
• When Olivia gives Theo her first pair of gloves and tells her about her "sensitivities," she promises they'll talk more about it as Theo gets older, to help her understand and control her gift. Except they never got to have another conversation about it, because Olivia died days later. So now adult Theo is stuck with an ability she doesn't understand and can't control, which helps her help people at the expense of hurting herself.
• Luke attempts to burn down Hill House, and the house tries to kill him in revenge, only stopped because his family knew he was there and came to help him. If Mr. Dudley hadn't been able to persuade Hugh not to try that the night Olivia died, they and Mrs. Dudley might have all died in the house that night too.
• Did Steven actually tell Luke and his sisters the truth about what happened the night their mother died? If he did, the truth would have redeemed Hugh's memory for the siblings but tarnished Olivia's—exactly what their father had sacrificed so much to avoid. If he didn't, the cycle just begins anew, with a different person left as the only one holding that terrible secret and the only one who truly understands just how dangerous and evil the house really is.
• When Nell calls Hugh in the first episode, Hugh tries to send Steven to check on her because he's closest to where she normally lives (implied to be somewhere in California) and Luke is in rehab and can't go himself. But it turns out that Nell had gone back to Hill House, which is shown to be within driving distance of where Shirley and Theo live. If Hugh had known where she was and had sent one of the girls after her instead (probably Shirley), they might have been able to catch her. But that still might not have saved Nell. Who knows what kind of fight the house and its spirits might have put up to try to keep both Nell and Shirley?
• William Hill (the bowler hat ghost) zeroed in on Luke because - according to the lore - the two of them are alike. Following the death of his mother, William went into treatment for insanity, where he met Poppy, only for their lives to spiral into madness and tragedy again. Following the death of his mother, Luke went into treatment for addiction, where he met Joey, only to relapse again, multiple times. It's impossible to know, but Hill taking back his hat and putting the scare on Luke might not have been malicious - he could easily have been trying to tell him "Don't be like me".

Fridge Logic:

• In the climax of the book, Eleanor has a genuine paranormal experience, and the doctor's first instinct is to fire her rather than conduct interviews? Heck, everyone turns on her for it, like this is the last straw in a long line of childish stupidity. You'd think at least Mrs. Montague (the only one besides her boyfr-"companion" Arthur who genuinely believes in hauntings and psychic phenomena) would be demanding that they talk to her about it, even if it is only sleepwalking.
  • Eleanor is a very Unreliable Narrator by this point. It's more likely that they're sending her away out of concern after that paranormal experience almost killed her — which the next one does — and that the House twists her mind into believing they're callously abandoning her in order to isolate her. The exception being Mrs. Montague, who cares only for herself and dear Arthur.
  • Dr. Montague makes it clear to all of them at the start that if he thinks the house is starting to get into anyone's head, he'll send that person away for their own safety. He'd already seen evidence of the house taking a particular interest in Eleanor previously, and that night showed she was returning the interest. He probably should have arranged an interview about it, sometime later and well away from the house, but as he kept saying, he wanted Eleanor to leave in the hopes that she'd forget about the house and it would lose its grip on her.

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