Hill House is so strange because it’s a horror series that pretty much fails at horror (it’s really not all that scary) but just excels at pretty much everything else to the point of looping back into being truly frightening.
Like, the writers use the long series format to their advantage and focus on writing complex characters with real motives and agency so that the audience actually genuinely cares about those characters, so when horror trope #44 comes along and some ghost is banging on the walls, we actually feel afraid for the characters not because OohOho spooky ghost but because the characters are in real and present danger and we don’t want to see them get hurt, which is something so many horror films fail at.
You can have a visually terrifying monster or grotesque violence or a suffocating atmosphere, but all that is thwarted by flat characters whose well-being is inconsequential to the audience.
