==_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.