==_Light Spoilers on top, with heavier spoilers to follow. This review was written specifically for the first season (and if any other seasons are made, it's a crapshoot as to whether or not I'll ever watch them, given the disappointment of the first)._==

Horror and thrillers are often about tension and suspense, and _The Haunting of Hill House_ is no different. The first six episodes (honestly, more like, episode 3-6) are great build up for a payoff that never comes. The Bent-Neck Lady is a great moment of ramping up the tension, but it's not powerful enough to carry the plot on its own.

The next three episodes (7-9) mostly meander about, trying to make us care about the family, and constantly posturing that the House is a place of true terror. A terror that, upon reaching the finale... simply never comes. Like [spoiler]Olivia[/spoiler], the series falls on its face, hard.

==_Heavier, but tagged, spoilers ahead._==

The series advertises itself as a tense horror, but doesn't seem to want to be come the finale. Lots of plot threads never really pay off ([spoiler]like the utterly pointless floating man[/spoiler]), and the ones that do absolutely should have been built up better ([spoiler]Abigail being real felt pretty cheap, and could have been hinted at much better[/spoiler]).

If the series wanted to mind fuck the audience, but not go the full horror route, they should have maintained Steven's skepticism. [spoiler]Keep Hugh out of the obvious haunting stuff, make one of the kids (probably Shirley) not see what the others see. Make the Dudleys elusive, maybe superstitious, but not clearly wrapped up in the hauntings. Maintain the question of whether Olivia (and by extension, Theo) was 'sensitive' and the House itself is haunted; or if Olivia had been schizophrenic and passed it on to her kids.[/spoiler]

Alternatively, given the [spoiler]time hopping nature of the Bent-Neck Lady reveal[/spoiler], having the House bending reality around the Crains would have been an interesting mind fuck as well. [spoiler] What if, as the adult Crains beat on the door of the Red Room to attempt to get to Luke, we flash back to the children, jumping at the sound of the pounding door in the past? The banging that Theo and Shirley heard as children, actually the sound of their future selves stumbling against the walls in terror. The past and future are tangled together in the Hill House.[/spoiler]

Or maybe, Hill House deals with [spoiler]Postpartum Depression, or a similar phenomena The House echoes Poppy Hill's madness, as she, in life, 'woke' her child into death to 'protect' it in a fit of insanity before killing herself. Now her ghost infects the relationships between mother and child. We see bits of it in Mrs. Dudley, and then, eventually, Poppy attempts to infect Olivia and the twins.[/spoiler]

Any of these could have been precursors to a shorter version of the [spoiler]sappy, happy[/spoiler] ending we got, and still payed off all the tension built up from before. Hell, even a very typical fright fest of ghosts tormenting in the Crains in the final episode would have been predictable, and ultimately too easy, but still more satisfying.

What we got instead, was a great build up to a flat ending, ultimately deflating what came before. I am the kind of person who usually says that an ending doesn't ruin the journey. A bad ending can be overwritten in your mind with something better, or ignored, as long as the journey is still great, but with a story built on suspense, the payoff becomes the backbone of the entire thing. What could have been a solid 8 or maybe a 9, with a good ending, is relegated to a 6, held up only by the fact that there were great moments of potential before it led to something flat.

MAJOR SPOILERS!!!

So this is tough. There were some absolutely INCREDIBLE episodes! Two Storms and Bent-Neck Lady stand out... This had the potential to be a 9 or 10. In fact, I initially rated the show a 9 just after finishing it. Then I thought about it for a few days. Thought about how it all ended and what it all implied for the series as a whole. And I got angry... It felt like a betrayal. Such a huge tonal shift...

So the house "digests" these kids and their parents through their fears. It makes them see or do horribly crazy shit till they either kill themselves or others in the house. Dark as hell, yeah? But apparently this isn't actually a bad thing as "those who walk there, walk together". They turned the house with all it's vile evilness... into a somewhat "misunderstood" place where if you die there you can live forever with your loved ones who have also died there (yay!). What the hell...

A couple other weird things that bugged... Not necessarily in a bad way, but things I still think about...

So for Nell to be haunted by her future-self, the house must exist outside of time somehow (confetti monologue?). We don't just have ghosts from the past haunting the present, but ghosts of the future haunting the "present" as well. There seems to be a bit of a time paradox at play here... Chicken born before the egg type of thing.

And why did the Tall Man (who'd always been looked down upon) haunt Luke? Because Luke's future self would always be looked down upon because of his addiction? Maybe the house could take the form of those that died within, use whatever form best suited its purpose at the time. That would make sense with the whole "that wasn't mom" thing. Poppy was just plain evil so the mom's mania at least made a little sense...

And with this foresight the house seemed to have, why'd it target Luke when it should have seen that it wouldn't get him? Was he just a "bigger snack" of sorts (bigger than his older siblings, who were never really targeted the way Luke and Nell were)? Was it because Luke was Nell's twin (the Twin Thing)?

Regardless, it was just the house feeding off fears I guess... Using these ghosts from the past and future to breed more and more fear until folks died. Beautifully dark up till a relatively bright and cheery end. I still enjoyed the hell out of the series, but really wish that ending was different.