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Originally Posted by Severian
But the Haunting of Hill House had acting and writing that was so fucking terrible it threatened to ruin the entire thing.
I didn’t make the commitment to keep watching until we saw the creepy super tall guy walk-floating around using his cane like a Venetian pole. That was a legitimately fucking scary visual, and it made me say, “OK, this utterly atrocious acting and paint-by-numbers dialogue is worth suffering through for a creep-out like this... Hope there’s more!”
There kinda wasn’t really any more.
Very, very bad show. Just very stupid. But yes, pretty or whatever.
Can we talk about how Timothy Hutton is playing an “old” version of a guy who’s *maybe* five years younger? Y’knkw, to cover that 18-year difference or whatever? Instead of just using makeup, they cast two people who look almost nothing alike and are for all intents and purposes the same age to play the same person at entirely different periods in his life?
Dumb.
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Whoa, say what you really mean. It's by no means a perfect show, but I did enjoy it a lot. I agree that the writing can be spotty from time to time - didn't like some of the emotional messages it tried to push - specifically referring to a moment in the closing minutes of the final episode here, but there were similar problems throughout the series as well. It did get a bit convoluted towards the end and the dialogue did lean into the sappy every now and then. That said though: I really liked the portrayal of the characters' personal demons. And I'd say most of the performances were at the very least decent. And damnit, was the atmosphere palbable. From the locations to the cinematography and the lighting: Top-notch. Hell, I absolutely loved the direction in episode 6. It was tense, it was claustrophobic, it got me invested in the plight of the characters. Yeah, it was "pretty" - but that's no small thing when we're talking atmospheric Horror. The Shining wouldn't have been as chilling without the eerily oversized and almost inately lonely atmosphere of the Overlook Hotel depicted in Kubrick's interpretation (to which the series pays some obvious hommage), neither would Alien have been what it was without the cold and claustrophobic interiors of the Nostromo. There's a lot to be said for production design, especially in that type of genre. Yeah, that hovering tall-guy apparation was balls-to-the-wall creepy and it was kind of hard to top that. But in my opinion, there were other more minor visual and storytelling-based choices that also added to the uneasy atmosphere.
True, they didn't really look alike. I was more put-off by the very obvious blue contacts of the supposedly younger version of Timothy Hutton's character though. They just weren't very convincing, but then again coloured contacts hardly ever are. I just wished they wouldn't have constantly called attention to them through dramatic closeups. But that was a minor thing. The casting of kid-and-adult versions of the main protagonists however was pretty spot-on though. They looked very alike. And I did look it up: Hutton and the other guy were actually 11 years apart. It's a bit of a stretch, but then again not a biggie.