(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House.”)
“The Haunting of Hill House” ended on about as happy a note as it possibly could have for the Crain family, with Steve (Michiel Huisman), Shirley (Elizabeth Reaser), Theo (Kate Siegel) and Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) all together, with their respective partners, celebrating Luke’s second year of sobriety.
Literally, about as much happiness as that poor family has experienced since before their parents decided to flip that Massachusetts mansion when they were kids — even though their father Hugh (Timothy Hutton), mother Olivia (Carla Gugino) and youngest sister Nellie (Victoria Pedretti) are now all trapped as ghosts inside Hill House.
That kind of upper ending is just where creator Mike Flanagan intends to leave their story, even if the show — which has garnered a huge following among viewers on social media since its Oct. 12 launch — were to be picked up for a second season by Netflix.
“I don’t want to speculate too much about season two until Netflix and Paramount and Amblin let us know if they want one,” Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly, in an interview published Tuesday. “What I will say, though, is that as far as I’ve ever been concerned with this, the story of the Crain family is told. It’s done. I think that there are all sorts of different directions we could go in, with the house or with something completely different. I love the idea of an anthology as well. But to me, I felt like the Crains have been through enough, and we left them exactly as we all wanted to remember them, those of us who worked on it.”
Flanagan said they’d messed around with a “cliffhanger ending” and some other ideas, “but ultimately, in the writers’ room and with the cast and everything else, we really felt like the story demanded a certain kind of closure from us and we were happy to close the book on that family.”
But don’t worry, “Hill House” fans, because if they decide to keep things going, Flanagan has no doubt they can come up with another spooktacular tale.
“That said, I think more than anything, the show is about haunted places and haunted people, as Steve says, and there’s no shortage of either,” Flanagan said. “So, there’s any number of things we could do, in or out of Hill House.”
“Haunting of Hill House” Season 1 is available for streaming on Netflix.