An Ode to The Haunting of Hill House’s Bent-Neck Lady
Spoiler warning: Spoilers ahead for Mike Flanagan’s TV series (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, etc.). And a content warning for discussion about depictions of suicide.
Recently, I was asked, “What is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?” Being a massive horror film fan—living for the thrill of a good scary movie in a darkened room, hoping that I’m unable to guess who the killer is so that I can fully enjoy the final act of the movie and their reveal—it was hard for me to think up a film that really scared me. Hulu’s No One Will Save You was probably the closest I’ve been to “on the edge of my seat” in the longest time, but it was a fun watch overall and left me with many thoughts and comparisons to Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s episode “Hush” (also pretty disturbing). So I wracked my brain: “What is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen?”
It hit me that the most truthful answer is probably Poltergeist, but only because I watched it when I was in 6th grade. I also have an irrational fear of clowns (which I thought I was free of when sitting down to watch the horror classic, but I guess you’re never really safe from clowns, are you?). I had to sleep in my mom’s bed for days after that. But I really wanted to share something I’d watched as an adult. And then I realized that the scariest or most disturbing thing I’d seen in the last decade was probably from The Haunting of Hill House.
As you’re probably asking, yes, I’ve seen more disturbing gore and traumatizing scenes in other movies and TV shows; another anthology horror series, American Horror Story, actually delivers way more gruesome and twisted storylines every year than Hill House. However, nothing has really hit me quite like Episode 5 of The Haunting of Hill House did the first time I watched it.
The episode, titled “The Bent-Neck Lady,” tells Nell (Eleanor) Crain’s (played by Victoria Pedretti) side of the story, which we got pieces of here and there throughout the first four episodes. In this one, we see the tragic tale of a girl who is consistently thrown aside, never given the help she needs and is left to go through life’s toughest moments without a support system. After a summer of torment in her childhood (during which her mother killed herself) and the subsequent mental and sleep issues because of it, we see her finally experience true happiness in her marriage to Arthur. But then we watch it crumble like everything else in her life. As a result, Nell unfortunately succumbs to Hill House’s call, which has been threatening to consume her even as an adult, and eagerly waits to succeed. The audience learns that not only was Nell hanged by the house’s ghosts (which would, of course, look like a suicide to her family), but also finds out this was the origin story of the Bent-Neck Lady. This figure was the star of little Nell’s (Violet McGraw) nighttime terrors, a dark figure with a severely bent neck who would scream at little Nell (and adult Nell) in her sleep-paralysis-induced “dreams.”
As Nell falls through floor after floor of her life, seeing all of the times the Bent-Neck Lady terrorized her former self through these new eyes, I remember being left with the most uneasy feeling. Isn’t getting killed by a haunted house hungry for your family’s blood enough? Why did she have to haunt herself throughout her past? All Nell wanted was to be understood, supported, and loved by her family, which was part of the reason why she was such a steadfast soldier for her addict brother, Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). And yet? She is cursed to be the monster and culprit of her childhood trauma.
Again, I’ve seen far more terrifying things visually, like the scene in Nope where the shiplike alien eats the people at the rodeo, and you’re left hearing their horrifying, suffocated screams as they move to be digested. And I’ve seen scenes that leave you almost too uncomfortable emotionally, like how I felt watching American Horror Story’s fifth season, Hotel (yes, all of it). But there was something just so viscerally, hauntingly sad about Nell’s death and the forever haunting of her younger self that felt so hopeless and tragic. Granted, the Nope scene is probably the closest I’ve come to feeling that way again. However, Pedretti’s portrayal of this broken woman with a fragile little girl still living inside of her, with really no shot at living through the trauma that Hill House gave her to begin with, is truly tangible in its sorrow. And the *boom, boom, boom* of her dropping as her neck bends under her weight will always stay with me.
That’s what Mike Flanagan’s television series do. They take horror concepts like hidden background ghosts, jumpscares, illusions, redirections, etc., and pair them with brilliant storytelling and nuanced, developed characters. I’ve brought up American Horror Story twice, and I’ll do it again because that show really changed the horror TV genre, as it won Golden Globes and Emmys. But, it doesn’t hold a candle to the storytelling Flanagan is doing season after season after season. Where Ryan Murphy had the hype, the morbidly grotesque, and the “prestige,” Flanagan has wholistic, planned storylines that take the pacing of a horror film and stretch it between 8 to 10 episodes. AHS typically didn’t have a cohesive arc, and—like most of Murphy’s creations—it never really could stick the landing by the end of each season.
Even if you judged Mike Flanagan on his own merit, you’d still have a handful of seasons of television that truly blows all horror storytelling out of the water.
After Hill House, he gave us The Haunting of Bly Manor, which, firstly, still has the best portrayal of a lesbian/sapphic relationship I’ve ever seen on TV (another thing Murphy could never do because he hates lesbians from a storytelling standpoint). On top of Dani (Pedretti) and Jamie’s (Amelia Eve) tragically beautiful love story, Bly Manor was truly a classic historical ghost story. Again, like Hill House, Bly Manor keeps all of its cards close to its chest, not revealing all the answers until the final act. That is what makes it a good ghost story and not a cliché one.
Then, Flanagan’s Midnight Mass was his first series outside of the “The Haunting of” format, which makes sense, given it was immensely personal for the director and writer. The series dealt with Catholicism, community, indoctrination, and vampires and dug deeply into a cult mindset. Many (including me, maybe) might call institutionalized religion culty anyway. Plus, there’s inherently something gothic and witchy about the Roman Catholic religion anyway. On top of Flanagan’s own experience with Catholicism and religion, the audience sees a story of how one small town falls victim to radicalized thinking by way of “God.” And, again, vampires are involved, which is always a nice touch. Midnight Mass is heavier and a bit darker than its predecessors thanks to its very real and uncomfortably relatable storyline (with parallels to the Jonestown Massacre), but it still has Flanagan’s hallmark writing and dialogue (complete with some good ‘ole Flanagan monologues, too, of course).
With all that said—and The Fall of the House of Usher paving another branch of Flanagan’s legacy as we speak—it’s easy to see why Flanagan’s series are as hauntingly beautiful as they are terrifying. The Flanaverse, as fans have lovingly dubbed it, mixes different types of horror with his writing to make a handful of different stories that all tell very human tales about what we universally fear. Sometimes, it’s mental illness, trauma, or outside factors that produce horror. In all of them, supernatural aspects add to the scare factor, but there are still always arguments in his stories on whether paranormal elements really did exist or if they were all in his characters’s heads. In reality, the tricks the human brain can play on us are even scarier if you ask me. Yet, nothing has truly moved or unsettled me, like the thumping of a broken woman falling to her tragic death and the eternal cursed life spent haunting her childhood self. It's something I think about often, my personal version of the “Roman Empire,” and likely something that even Flanagan won’t top again.