Too Scary; Didn't Watch - Bonus Episode: THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE - PART 1

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

This bonus episode preview contains a recap for the first episode of The Haunting of Hill House. To hear the rest of this episode, join our Patreon at: www.patreon.com/tsdwpodcastThe Haunting of Hill House is streaming on Netflix Follow the show: @TSDWpodcast on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. Check out our Patreon for bonus episodes and additional content! Rate Too Scary; Didn’t Watch 5 Stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave a review for Emily, Henley, and Sammy. Advertise on Too Scary; Didn't Watch via Gumball.fmSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is Emily, Henley, and Sammy, and you're listening to Too Scary, Didn't Watch. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Too Scary, Didn't Watch, March bonus episode number one. That's what this is. That's what this is. That's what this is. That's where you are. That's where we are. Hello. It's nice to be here. It's great to be here.

And I feel like this episode is one that we have been talking about probably since like the inception of this podcast. Wow. You know, we stick to mostly movie recaps, but had talked about at some point doing series. And we did Squid Game. But like truly from the beginning, I feel like people were like, oh, you should do. Haunting of Hill House. The Haunting of Hill House.

Which is what we are doing now. And we love Mike Flanagan. But we haven't done any of his movies, have we? Like Ouija? We have. We did Hush. Which one did we do? Oh we like Ouija we have we did Hush which one did we do oh Hush oh we did Dr. Sleep as well so okay we haven't done Oculus and we haven't done Gerald's Game um but yeah we've done a lot we've done a good amount of Mike Flanagan and he I I

just I love him yeah I love him yeah I I'll give you some stats about this series. It's created, obviously, by Mike Flanagan. Mm-hmm. Written by Mike Flanagan. Well, it's based on a book by Shirley Jackson. Actually, I didn't write down the names of all the writers. Are there multiple writers or did Mike Flanagan write all of it? I think it's like kind of a normal TV show where there's a writer's room and I just didn't

write down the writers' names. I genuinely don't remember no idea it feels like mike flanagan does a lot though so i wouldn't be surprised if he just fucking wrote the whole thing i feel like he wrote the whole thing with like one other person or something crazy like that it's a lot of writing he seems like he loves writing yeah mike flanagan loves writing because we've talked about Midnight Mass and how there's just endless monologues in that and it's just like he just loves to freaking He loves the written word.

Yeah. There's too much. That pulled me out of it real hard. But no, there's a lot of writers on this series. Yeah, there are. So I'm not gonna name them all. Sorry, you'll be anonymous. Sorry. Go to the IMDP IMDP IMDP name them all. Sorry, you'll be anonymous. Go to the IMDb IMDb IMDb

But it is starring Mikhail Hausman, which I looked up how to pronounce it and that is the correct pronunciation. It's spelled like Michael Huseman. Mikhail Hausman. Oh, he's from, he was in the Invitation, right? Yes.

And yeah, Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones. Nashville. Famously. That's what I know him from, Nashville. Connie Britton's love interest in season two or something. Oh, wow. Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Elizabeth Reeser, Oliver Jackson Cohen, Kate Siegel, Victoria

Pedretti, and Timothy Hutton. Wowee. It has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. People love this show. And an 8.6 on IMDb. So, Henley, you watched this when it came out, and what are your feelings

on its scariness as a notorious scaredy cat? So, I didn't think it was too scary, but I gotta say I rewatched it. I'm like a broken record at this point, but after having kids, this show, a lot of kids, a lot of extreme trauma happening

to these children. And that hit home in a way that it didn't before. Especially the little boy. There's a little six-year-old boy who is the cutest child actor they fucking chose the cutest kids on purpose they're so cute they're so cute they're so it makes me angry it's ridiculous how cute they are i tried to watch one episode once maybe we were all hanging

out and we were going to watch it. I thought it was too scary. I think it's pretty scary. I mean, I watched it when it came out. But I think this speaks to the difference between what Henley thinks is scary and what I think is scary. We've talked about this before, but ghosts and

demon shit scares me a lot. It doesn't scare me as much. it doesn't scare henley that much it really doesn't scare me as much i loved it because the drama within the family was so interesting to me and i loved the whole concept of like a family being traumatized by being haunted when they were kids genius why haven't hasn't there been more content like done like that before because it's so blurring the lines between like mental health and just you know what's what's what's you know nature versus nurture i i loved it and yeah i do think also that it like needs to be a series like the the depth of character exploration that they do like couldn't have been done in a movie so this is i feel like one of the first horror series well american horror story i guess

pre but those are those are so campy and outrageous right right this one is real like it's a real story about real relationships and yeah the acting's really good the writing's good i think it's great okay so you So you, Emily, watched a little bit and didn't make it through first episode. So this is all going to be fresh info for you. Absolutely. I am excited to hear and be a part of the conversation. Yeah. We've got a lot of ground to cover here. These are some dense episodes and we want to do them justice because they're very good. So this is going to be part one of a three-part series. Wow.

Okay, let's freaking dive in. Let's get into it. So episode one is called Stephen Sees a Ghost. We start in a spooky mansion. This is Hill House. And we see a young boy waking up in the middle of the night and hearing siblings in another room, like, I don't know, upset about something.

And he goes in and sees that in this room, there's a little girl and a little boy. These are the two cutest kids in the cast. Yeah. It's disgraceful. I like ranking them. I think it's just because they're the youngest. So they're just like adorable.

It's really fun and good to judge everyone based on their exterior. Yeah. That's what we do here. I like to do it. And I feel good about it. And I feel good that people are listening to me do it. Especially young children. Yeah, I'm like...

We're on board. I have no regrets about anything I've said. No, but I don't think it's bad to say that these kids are fucking cute as hell. It's insane. The boy has glasses that magnify his eyes. It's just not okay. Get out of here with that. They're like a full centimeter thick.

Like cook bottle glasses. It's too much. It's too much. Cute. And the little girl in this room has had a bad dream about the bent neck lady. And they all have,

I think, heard about bent neck lady before. They're kind of like, oh, bent neckck Lady again. Like this is a dream. This little girl's name is Nell. It's like Nell had another dream about Bent Neck Lady. Her brother that she is sharing the room with is Luke. They are twins.

And eventually the dad hears the, you know, ruckus happening in this room that the kids are up, comes in and says, what's going on? This again, the bent neck lady like, no, it's OK. It's just, you know, you're having a dream. Sometimes the mind can, when you wake up, have little remnants of dreams and but it's going to be OK. and but it's going to be okay we also get the context that they are in this house because they're fixing it up and then going to sell it so the parents are yeah something in real estate that they have move house to house fix up houses and sell them and live in them while they're fixing them up um maybe it's because he says something like you know we're not we're not going to be in this house forever uh it's it's okay and as he's he calms them down

gets them back to bed he's walking back to his room we pass another room with another daughter in it this is shirley she's talking in her sleep. There are five kids total. I don't think we see the third daughter in this scene, but there's also another daughter named Theo. Everyone gets back into bed and he gets into bed with his wife, who is Carla Gugino. And they're talking about the kids again. And back in the twins room, we see Carla Gugino. And they're, you know, talking about the kids again. And back in the twins room, we see them going to bed. And we see from the shadows emerges a woman with a bent neck in shadows just moving towards Nell. And then we get our opening titles.

But we see the bentck Lady is real. Emily, this speaks to you because you're having some serious neck issues. I'm the lady with a bent neck. And unfortunately, a hurt neck is a theme throughout this show in lots of ways. Is she bent neck? Like, what does this mean? It's like her neck is bent at not quite a 90 degree angle, but pretty close. Like she was being hung.

Perhaps, you know, we don't want to jump to any conclusions. We don't want to jump to any conclusions. But that is about the correct angle. Right. OK. And so this title sequence, I feel like is I feel like every title sequence in this year was this exact title sequence where it's just like orchestral music and 3D renderings of various objects. It was like Westworld was like this. Yeah.

The crown. And, you know, it just seems like everything of Game of Thrones did it for a while. Right. Yeah. Game of Thrones, I feel like was a little bit the map. It like changed a lot based on what was in the episode, which is at least a little variation on this. But yes, kind of all I feel like standard title sequence.

I love a retrospective on title sequences throughout like the past 20 years. Yes. There was a Key and Peele sketch where they made fun of True Detective, I think. And they had like a funny opening that was making fun of the True Detective opening. It was like, oh, yeah, all these openings are like this like true blood was similar like they're all like like the like folksy music and then like disturbing country yes backgrounds like right um i just there's themes they really stick to themes and I love to see people make fun of them. Just want to flag that. What's the theme right now? I don't know, but I will say, I just, real quick, have you guys watched Severance?

No. The Apple TV show? Okay, this is a fucking cool thing that they're getting into, which is, like, a really dynamic, is like um a really dynamic like rhythmic animation and it's an animation of adam scott's character like going like falling through all these different levels and like multiplying and then like becoming small and getting big and it's i love it like i love what they can do with animation now is so compelling and i feel like more and more openings are like leaning into that a little bit. Yeah. I would also say another one that I feel like is getting more popular is just having the title without a title sequence. Like Euphoria, just like name of the show at one point

and it doesn't have a title sequence. I feel like that's becoming a little more common too. One hundred percent. Yes. And they still have the skip intro for sometimes and it's like, it's two seconds. Skipping a second. Two seconds. Yeah. Okay. So then we cut to present day, which by the way, sorry, in the opening, it says Hill House then. So in the whole series, we will be jumping back and forth in time between these kids' childhood and their present day adulthood so first we meet adult steven who is the oldest child and we see that he is interviewing a woman about having seen her dead husband's ghost and we learn that he is a writer of ghost stories, essentially. And he has written a book called The Haunting of Hill House

based on his own childhood experiences. But he is quite a skeptic of it all. And he reveals to this woman, you know, he never actually saw a ghost and that it's a little bit of a fictionalized version of what happened to his his siblings what they claim happened we just get in the sense that he doesn't totally buy into it but this this woman that he's talking to really does and is really interested in his family and is like i would love for your dad to write a book so people in this world know the story of of hill house because he has written about it

um he gets a phone call from nell the his youngest sister and doesn't answer it we go back to the past and we see again now saying she saw Bent Neck Lady having what the parents think is a nightmare. She's too scared to sleep in her room now because that's where she sees the Bent Neck Lady. So her mom, what is the mom's name? Do you remember? Wait, I think I have it right here. Olivia? Olivia, yes.

She takes her downstairs. They're going to make up a little bed for her on the couch so that she doesn't have to sleep in her room. They get her all set up there and Olivia makes a bed next to her, sleeps on the floor, lies down on the floor next to her until Nell falls asleep. And then once Nell is asleep, Olivia gets up, goes back to her own bed, and we see Nell on the couch alone, and her hand starts moving, and her eyes open, and it looks like she can't move, and she's just kind of moving her fingers, and her eyes are looking around, and then she looks

directly up, and her eyes get really big, like she looks scared, and the camera pulls out and rotates, and we see Bent Neck Lady floating above her, looking down at her. Back to present day, we see, we're basically going to see each of the children, what their life is now in the present day. Next, we see Shirley, who is the second oldest.

And her and her husband own like a, what do you call it, funeral home? A funeral home, yeah. Yeah, and she does the embalming? Is that what that's called? I think body preparation. But in the first scene we see her, she's talking to a kid who is preemptively saying that he doesn't want to see his grandmother's dead body. And she's helping him through that and saying comforting him and saying, know i'm gonna make her look exactly how she looked to you it's gonna be okay so she's like feeling good about helping these kids come to terms with death yes and she looks down at her phone she has a voicemail from nell uh and listens to it. And Nell says that she's worried about Luke.

We go back into the past. We see that there is a room in Hill House that has a red door that they refer to as the Red Room. And they just can't get into it. There's a groundskeeper. There's two groundskeepers, Mr. and Mrs. Dudley.

Is that their names? Yeah, I think so. And he has a master key that works to every room but it does not work for the red room so there's just a room in this house that they live in that they can't access we've all been there we've all been there you gotta break down that door horrifying there's it can't be a mystery room in my house hell no cannot absolutely no no uh it's i think shirley that is trying to get into it with this universal key she can't get into it and as she walks away we see little feet walking around inside of this room

back in the present day we see see Steven calling back Nell. She has an answer. He leaves a message saying, you know, you said you were worried about Luke. I called his rehab. He's doing great. He's been sober for 90 days. Just got his 90 day chip. Is she having some sort of like twin connection to him?

Yes, that might be. It's a twin thing. It's a twin thing. You don't put twins in something and not have twin shit. You got a twin thing you gotta do twin stuff um present day uh we meet theodora who is the middle child and she picks up a girl at a bar she's like at she's looking really fucking cool this is kate siegel who is mike flanagan's wife star of hush yep and oh yeah yeah yeah okay and she wears these leather gloves like that go up her are the looks she looks very cool but also like what are these gloves about yeah the gloves are a thing it's a thing and we see her yeah picking up this

locking eyes with this woman at a bar taking her home they hook up and as soon as they finish hooking up she like puts her gloves back on and it's like i guess i'm a bit of a germaphobe and the girl gets a little offended by that and she asks then she asks the woman to leave she's like i've got work in the morning like it's a little awkward at the end she doesn't she clearly uh got a lot of walls up and we also see after she kicks the girl out that she lives in the guest house of shirley and her husband's like funeral home area so she lives on the property with them the The dad gets a call from Nell. We've just seen little clips of Nell looking scared, calling each of her family members a lot. This time we see Nell is in a car.

She's looking like white as a ghost, very like she hasn't slept in days. She is in a car. It's raining and she calls her dad. He answers. And she says, Dad, remember, bent neck lady? Says, yeah. And she says, she's back. And her dad gets up and says, I need you to drive to Stevens. Like, Stevens is closest to you. Like, whatever is going on. Like, I want you with someone. I'm getting up right now. I'll drive out there. I'll see you in the morning. Okay. Like, stay at Stevens and I'll see you in the morning. And she says like, yeah, I'm home now. We see that she's not. She is in her car and she's like, yeah, it's fine. Like, I love you.

She is in her car and she's like, yeah, it's fine. Like, I love you. Yeah, I'll see you tomorrow. And hangs up. And we just see her looking at a bright light, looking very transfixed by something. Clearly lying to her dad about whatever is going on. And then we see that she is parked outside of Hill House. Which is like abandoned and... Present day. It's like, yeah, like a run

down nasty, nasty mansion. No one's lived there clearly for a long time. So the real estate venture didn't really pan out. No, and clearly no one wanted to live there after they lived there. Seems like. Wonder why. Then we cut back to the past

of the dad wakingven up in his room saying we gotta go looking panicked he's like close your eyes as we you know don't don't you dare open your eyes uh we gotta get in the car and And Stephen's like totally freaked out. But the dad picks him up. He's like, OK, one, two, three. They run down the hall. We see a woman in a nasty nightgown cross across the hallway running like in a creepy ass way. I think Stephen does open his eyes and see that, right?

I think he does a little bit, but then he's too scared. Yeah, he like blocks it out. Blocks it out real quick. Shuts him real quick. Holding on to his dad. Like his dad's like carrying him like this. And he's like, what, 12 or something like that? Yeah.

And the dad's just like running, carrying him. And Stephen, eyes shut real tight. Yeah. carrying him and Stephen eyes shut real tight. Yeah. They get outside and all the rest of the kids are in the car, all of them really

confused and scared. They don't know what's going on. One of them yells at the dad like, we got to go back and get mom. Mom's still in there. The dad says, that's not your mother. And they drive off. Back in present day, we see the dad calling Stephen, saying like something's going on with Nell.

You're closest. You need to get to Nell. present day in a nasty nightgown, just dancing around in the rundown rooms of Hill House. This place is, I mean, it's horrifying. It's like just a dusty, broken down mansion. And she is smiling and dancing and twirling through all of it. It's very unsettling. And then we see a clock, like an alarm clock at 3.03. And all of the other siblings, all four of the siblings, we see quick shots of all of them bursting awake in bed one of them says nelly's in the red room and they all look like they've just woken up from a nightmare they don't know what happened but it's it clearly all of all of them have felt something happen

meanwhile and present day oh yeah i guess the next day or next night steven is still investigating this woman's story about seeing her husband's ghost and he's recreating the setting that she said it happened in like you know it was this time at night i was laying in bed i felt um i don't know water yeah i felt water and heard the car he the husband died in a car accident she's like i heard the car crash and he lays in her bed at the time that he she said it happened and water drips on him and he sees that there is like a leak on the ceiling and then he hears a car crash and it's because they have recently removed a stop sign from the street outside and so he basically disproves her sighting of her husband's ghost and it's like cool kind of proud of himself i feel like

he's such a skeptic that yeah he's just like well you see what really happened is this this and this and then we flash back to not the not the past of them as children but something like i don't know seven years ago or something like that where steven first published the book the haunting of hill house House, and we see Shirley's reaction to it. And she is fucking fuming mad, like, how dare you publish this? This is outrageous. I can't believe you would write this. Really furious about it. Then we flashback back to the past, seemingly pretty soon after the dad took all the kids away from Hill from Hill House and he's now in a lawyer's office and I think Stephen's in there with him and the dad is looking very panicked and saying like they're gonna how do I get out of this so they're gonna think that I killed her. It seems like Steven should not be in the room for this

conversation. But he's, yeah, clearly, like, panicked about whatever went down at Hill House that night. We do not see what happened to the mom, but it seems like something bad happened and the dad is, like, panicked about

it. Yeah, because the press, I mean, knows about it at this point. Right. And it's starting to be talked about. And the dad doesn't look good. No, he's not. It's not looking good. Well, it's not looking good.

It wouldn't look good. You always think it's always the husband. I think that before Ghost, for sure. Yeah. First up is the husband or boyfriend or man involved in any way at all. We see Steven driving home from the woman's house that he was staying at the ghost, the ghost husband woman. And he calls his wife, Lee, who's played by Samantha Sloyan, who was Bev in Midnight Mass. And I just love her. She's great.

We have seen in a flat a flashback like them happily married and in this phone call it's clear that they are not together anymore she's very short with him is like why are you calling me and he says you know i think nell might come to the house something's going on with nell he hasn't told any of the siblings that they've split up yet, but it's clear that they've been split up for a little while. We also get a scene where we see young Luke, the kid with the glasses, drawing in like a little tree house or something. It's a tree house. And he's doing some creepy child drawings you gotta have it in

ghost and demon movies it's a staple and steven is asking him like who's this it's and he says it's the little girl i see in the woods and there's a lot of drawings of just a little girl in the woods and then back in present day we're seeing uh steven arriving back at his house and he walks in and freezes when he sees luke walking down the stairs of steven's apartment carrying a bunch of steven's shit so it's luke is robbing steven and he looks really bad we were led to believe that he is was 90 days sober luke says first thing like it's not what it looks like um but it's clear that steven's like heard this before and it's like all right like sure uh i need you to not take my ipad i have a lot of work stuff on that. Let me give you 200 bucks instead. You can take all the rest of the shit.

Just don't take my iPad. And Luke is like looking really like pleading with him. Like, it's not what it looks like. And he's like, yeah, I like. Sure. OK, here you go. Just leave. Just get out.

And so Luke leaves and Stephen walks up to his apartment and sees Nell inside the apartment. And he immediately is annoyed with her and is like, were you in here when Luke was robbing me? Like, did you just not say anything? Like, what's like, that's fucked up. You just let him do that. And he's kind of talking at her and she's not really saying anything she's looking really sad and he's like you know dad was saying that something was wrong with you like what's going on with you and luke and then his phone rings and it's his dad and he answers it

and his dad sounds like he's very upset and has been crying it's also kind of a broken crinkly like line it's like a creepy sound and we just hear the dad say it's Nell she's dead she killed

herself and Steven turns around like well who the fuck is this in my apartment nell is right there in his face and her skin like turns gray and ghosty and she opens her mouth and screams and that's the end of the episode episode i'm riveted I'm riveted I love that shit in the bag oh my god oh my god

there's so much more content Emily just fucking buckle up I love this I get to binge a TV show all just while fucking sitting here we're binging it IRL alright soy episode 2 I can't remember what it's called to binge a TV show. I'll just while fucking sitting here. We're binging it. We're binging it IRL. Um, alright. Soy. Episode 2.

Um, I can't remember what it's called. Open Casket. Well, let's freaking get into it. To hear the rest of this episode, head on over to our Patreon at patreon.com slash TSDW podcast and join us in Tony

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and to weekly trailer reaction videos, and you can vote in what we cover in our bonus episodes it's a great place to be you're gonna love it and if not we will see you here next week with your regularly scheduled programming we love you very much goodbye