The girls and I have been watching “The Haunting of Hill House” over the past few nights. When I was growing up I used to love, much like the Victorians, the scary and supernatural.
Macabre stuff like Edgar Allen Poe stories, photos of ghosts and people with ectoplasm coming out of their mouths
(very old fashioned – who has even heard of this stuff now??) – it was delicious, in much the same way that we kids used to love locking each other into an old wooden chest until the victim would cry out in claustrophobic terror. I’m sure that’s normal. Anyway, torture porn has never appealed to me but I love a good ghost story. The Netflix series has been relatively tame I must say. Interestingly there seems to be a generation gap in what we find scary.
Some of the stuff the girls find terrifying I have found a little funny (tall men in bowler hats floating across the floor), but the dimly seen shape in a dark corner seems to have a special power of dread for me. Jump scares on the other hand have a universal appeal.
I must confess I have woken up in the middle of the night a couple of times, since we started watching, and struggled to get back to sleep. Menacing shapes have loomed at me out of the darkness. I’ve hidden under the bedclothes even if I’m too hot. And if I need to get out of bed to go to the bathroom (a euphemism for having to pee) then I have to leap away from my bed to avoid my foot being grabbed by whatever scary thing is under the bed. This is normal too I think. Last night there was even a strange man in bed with me! But it was only my husband.
Only four more episodes to go.