Netflix's 19-Episode Paranormal Franchise Deserves Its Masterpiece Status

Although Netflix has a lot of good horror shows to its name, one franchise truly deserves to be called a masterpiece of its genre. It’s only fair that some commentators are slow to call Netflix shows masterpieces, since their later outings can often fail to live up to their initial acclaim. If Netflix ended Stranger Things after season 1, the show would likely be lauded as an iconic and unmissable one-season cult hit in the vein of Freaks and Geeks, My So-Called Life, or the short-lived space Western Firefly.

Instead, Stranger Things outstayed its welcome, became a parody of its old self, and squandered a lot of audience goodwill on its bloated series finale. Although Netflix’s The Midnight Club faced the opposite problem, as the show was canceled before it could truly fulfill its potential, one horror franchise from the streaming service managed to avoid both these pitfalls. Across its 19 episodes, this two-show franchise proved to be a true masterpiece of its genre.

Writer/director Mike Flanagan's The Haunting Of… series started in 2018 with the release of The Haunting Of Hill House, a loose adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s horror novel of the same name. While Jackson’s novel had already been adapted to the screen twice before, once as a faithful masterpiece in 1963’s The Haunting and again as an unintentionally hilarious disaster in 1999’s The Haunting, Flanagan’s miniseries was something different. Like its follow-up, 2020’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, the series used its literary inspiration as a jumping-off point for a whole new story.

Mike Flanagan's The Haunting Of... Franchise Is Horror Perfection

Like AMC’s later Interview with the Vampire, albeit even looser with its source material than that Anne Rice adaptation, The Haunting Of Hill House used the book it was based on as a way to explore a diverse array of themes including intergenerational trauma, addiction, codependency, and parental neglect. While Jackson's original novel follows the gradual mental breakdown of its lonely protagonist Nell, Flanagan’s show instead illustrates the troubled bonds between the estranged Crain family.

Haunted by the disturbing events of their childhood in a seemingly haunted house, the family’s adult children cope by retreating into infidelity, drug abuse, commitment-phobic hookups, and cynical attempts to cash in on their trauma. All the Crain children struggle to make sense of their shared time in Hill House, but it is only when a tragedy drags them back there that viewers start to learn the truth about their youth.

Although Flanagan’s show has moments of perfectly judged comedic relief, The Haunting Of Hill House is a rare family drama that is as poignant and tragic as it is genuinely terrifying. One of the best horror miniseries of all time, The Haunting Of Hill House is full of legitimately scary sequences that will stick with the viewer long after the show ends. However, these are balanced by insightful character studies that prove the show is more than just a perfectly calibrated scare-delivery system.

The Haunting Of Hill House Is A Bit Better Than The Haunting Of Bly Manor

It would always have been impossible for Flanagan to live up to the sky-high expectations set by the success of The Haunting Of Hill House, and directing The Shining’s sequel Doctor Sleep in the intervening year between the two Haunting Of… shows can’t have helped. While that Stephen King adaptation was better than many detractors claimed at the time, 2020’s The Haunting Of Bly Manor struggled to live up to its predecessor.

A loose adaptation of Henry James’ seminal ghost story The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting Of Bly Manor arrived in October 2020 and was met with largely positive reviews. The Haunting Of Bly Manor features one of Flanagan’s scariest scenes ever, but the show’s ambitious, time-twisting narrative didn’t hang together quite as perfectly as that of The Haunting Of Hill House, and its sprawling ensemble cast was a little too large for everyone to get a moment in the spotlight.

That said, The Haunting Of Bly Manor was only a disappointment when judged by the exceedingly high standard that The Haunting Of Hill House set. Compared to most horror shows, the series was a masterpiece, and compared to other horror anthologies that utilize recurring cast members in new roles with each new season, like the infamously messy American Horror Story franchise, the show was a work of genius.

Flanagan’s next Netflix show, 2021’s standalone religious horror Midnight Mass, was another peerless miniseries that saw the writer/director fully indulge his Stephen King influences in the story of an isolated island besieged by a strange supernatural threat. 2022’s The Midnight Club was an anomaly in Flanagan’s Netflix canon for numerous reasons, as the Christopher Pike adaptation was primarily aimed at a younger audience of teen viewers and was intended to be more than a one-off minseries.

Will There Be A Third Series In Flanagan's The Haunting Of... Franchise?

Sadly, The Midnight Club season 2 never happened, although star Igby Rigney did parlay his success in the miniseries into a lead role in the later Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Shards. Flanagan, meanwhile, recovered from The Midnight Club’s cancellation with his triumphant Netflix swan song, 2023’s self-contained miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher. Although the show doesn’t share its title format with The Haunting Of Hill House and The Haunting Of Bly Manor, the loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptation can still be considered a third addition to The Haunting Of franchise.

Like The Haunting Of Hill House and The Haunting Of Bly Manor, The Fall of the House of Usher features roles for Flanagan’s regular collaborators, Kate Siegel, Henry Thomas, Samantha Sloyan, and Carla Gugino. Like those two earlier shows, the series uses the writing of an iconic legend of horror literature as a jumping-off point for an original self-contained story of a dysfunctional family coming to terms with their dark past.

Since there are no plans for a third The Haunting Of series anytime soon and Flanagan is busy with Prime Video’s upcoming Carrie miniseries as well as two further Stephen King adaptations, The Dark Tower and a reboot of The Mist, The Fall of the House of Usher is likely the closest that viewers will ever get to a conclusion to the trilogy. Luckily, the Mike Flanagan show perfectly complements The Haunting Of Hill House and The Haunting Of Bly Manor.