'Textbook terror': How The Haunting of Hill House rewrote horror's rules

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'Textbook terror': How The Haunting of Hill House rewrote horror's rules

By Alison Flood

 

Paranoia and spectral dread … the trailer for Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House. / screen grab from youtube.com

 

As Shirley Jackson told it, the inspiration for The Haunting of Hill House came after she read about a group of 19th-century psychic researchers who moved into a supposedly haunted house in order to study it.

 

“They thought that they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things,” she said, “and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds.”

 

Published in 1959, Jackson’s resulting novel has defined the haunted house story ever since.

 

Stephen King, in his history of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, said The Haunting of Hill House is – along with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw – one of “the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years”, while Ramsey Campbell called it “the greatest of all haunted house novels, and arguably the greatest novel of the supernatural”.

 

 

Full Story: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/11/textbook-terror-how-the-haunting-of-hill-house-rewrote-horrors-rules

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Quote

 

'Hill house has stood for a 100 years and may stand for a hundred more , those that walk there walk alone '.

I remember seeing that film around 1960 , truly terrifying and I still remember that comment. Walking to a school mate's house for the night , an iron gate slammed shut , we ran the rest of the way .