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Harlock posted:The flapper lady ghost who is somehow powerful enough/influential to influence Olivia into murdering children and generally making it seem like dying in this house is akin to eternal suffering is now turned into an impromptu heaven for the Crains and the caretakers.  Which AHS already did better. I liked the show and I'd be fine with a happy ending but just didn't like how the house got transformed like that.Open Source Idiom posted:Except he did see things. Right in the first episode there's a POV shot from his perspective, where he can see something chasing him and and his father as Steve's carried out of the house. Fast Luck fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Oct 31, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 20:39
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KilGrey posted:I wonder if Nell and Luke got more of the ghostly poo poo because they are younger and more prone to flights of fancy. The other three kids are older and more likely to try to rationalize things. That fits with the theme of the house as a predator. They mention the "twin thing" a lot, but that doesn't seem to be something the house would be able to use against them directly like it does with Liv's "shine." Theo's power also manifested through real-world physical contact, so she knew something was wrong in the house almost immediately. The house seems to take much longer to "digest" an otherwise normal adult mind like Hugh or William Hill. This doesn't help the ending though, because why does the house suddenly give a poo poo at all about people that die of natural causes like the old woman or the Dudleys (other than Abigail)? You'd think it would be more selective and not just pack the room with infants and clock repairmen.
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Oct 31, 2018 23:05
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I dunno, a soul is a soul.
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Oct 31, 2018 23:38
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potee posted:This doesn't help the ending though, because why does the house suddenly give a poo poo at all about people that die of natural causes like the old woman or the Dudleys (other than Abigail)? You'd think it would be more selective and not just pack the room with infants and clock repairmen. Maybe sometimes you cook a meal and then sometimes you get fast food.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:00
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Just finished. Overall I loved it. I thought the first episode was a bit rough. It was throwing many horror cliches out and I noticed they were really strongly pushing Apple product placement. For whatever reason it took me a little while to figure out that we were seeing present-day versions of the children. Agreed with the OP - casting the mother, Shirley, Theo, AND Nell as pale skinned, slender girls with long dark hair was not the smartest casting choice, as initially it was really hard to figure out who was who. For whatever reason, they also call Shirley by the nickname "Shirl", which I was interpreting as "Cheryl", making it harder to figure out how many daughters they had. After taking a moment to piece it all together in the 2nd episode, however, it was fine. The first half of the show has a truly great dynamic with the intricate flashback / present day juxtapositions and new scenes from a different characters' perspective that re-contextualize previous scenes. I felt that this momentum and energy kept building up and culminated with episode six, which, I can honestly say is one of the best episodes of anything I've ever watched. Multiple extended tracking shots (even if there probably are some hidden cuts), superb acting, etc. The whole thing was just so gut wrenching and real and unsettling. It's probably also the creepiest episode because of how real it feels. After episode six, however, I felt that there was a noticeable loss of steam. The remaining episodes lack that strong dynamic the first few had, and this is where they clearly seem to be stalling for time, as they start throwing in multiple unnecessarily long monologues where I found myself going "alright, I get it, let's move on." A notable exception would be Theo's emotional explosion at the end of episode 8. I think when examining the story arcs of the entire season, every episode appropriately falls where it should, but episodes 7 and 8 in particular did not have enough to say to fill out 60 minutes. I think the flapper ghost is probably the biggest misstep of the entire thing. To me, the reveal that the Bent Neck ghost is actually Nell, or that the rattling doorknob in the first episode was actually just the mother on the other side played well into the ongoing theme of different perspectives on events. But I agree with other posters that giving an other ghost a character and some explanation was dumb. Thankfully, they kept the majority of the ghosts un-explained. I didn't mind the "happy" ending. The entire time I was worried they were going to pull some twist that rendered the whole thing or all of the scares pointless, such as everything being a time loop, or the ghosts actually being psychological. What would the alternative ending be? This was a story about past trauma and putting walls up around family. The message was that family is important. The alternative to this "happy" ending is that they all still hate each other. If they still hate each other at the end, then they don't have a complete character arc. I also don't think it was entirely a happy ending for mom, dad, Nell, and the Dudleys, it is at best bittersweet. They get to be together but at the expense of being stuck in a depressing hell. Perhaps they shouldn't have used heaven-like imagery as dad joined them. But yeah, overall, really good stuff. Shits all over American Horror Story.
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Nov 2, 2018 08:01
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SweetMercifulCrap! posted:casting the mother, Shirley, Theo, AND Nell as pale skinned, slender girls with long dark hair was not the smartest casting choice, as initially it was really hard to figure out who was who. For whatever reason, they also call Shirley by the nickname "Shirl", which I was interpreting as "Cheryl", making it harder to figure out how many daughters they had. After taking a moment to piece it all together in the 2nd episode, however, it was fine. I didn't have a problem telling people apart, but yeah I briefly wondered what happened to Shirley, since they almost always call her "Shirl" (which, like you, I always heard as "Cheryl") as an adult but almost always call her Shirley as a child.
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Nov 2, 2018 10:48
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KilGrey posted:It’s all of the above. The house pulls those wishes, regrets and dreams out of you and uses it against you. Some (or all?) of the ghosts are all actual people who died in the house. Old lady ghost isn't exactly a wish or a regret or a dream she's an old lady who was sick and died in the house and can now give useful tips about whether other ghosts are trustworthy or not. It's silly to have Steve give basically the same monologue at the beginning and at the end. Open Source Idiom posted:Except he did see things. Right in the first episode there's a POV shot from his perspective, where he can see something chasing him and and his father as Steve's carried out of the house. That was Olivia who wasn't dead yet.
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Nov 2, 2018 11:07
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The flaper ghost's exposition felt like an afterthought, or a studio decision to make the show much less subtle. It would have made more sense to give us a one-off episode set in the 20s, but that would have required all-new sets. I also feel like they missed a trick with her story somewhat paralleling Luke and his recovery "girlfriend's" story, especially since the cane ghost had attached to Luke.
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Nov 2, 2018 11:54
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Fast Luck posted:I was always annoyed at his not believing ever since he saw an appearance of Nell as a ghost in his apartment before he found out Nell was dead. Get out of denial dude! I was OK with this. Sometimes people see something that messes with their carefully constructed belief system, and their response is to double down HARDER on what they believe.
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Nov 2, 2018 12:43
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Steve thought they all suffered from unchecked mental illness, of course he didn't believe he saw a ghost.
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Nov 2, 2018 12:46
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moths posted:The flaper ghost's exposition felt like an afterthought, or a studio decision to make the show much less subtle. It would have made more sense to give us a one-off episode set in the 20s, but that would have required all-new sets. I believe flapper ghost and the full reveal of the various ghosts in the house are all leading to season 2 of this show
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Nov 2, 2018 15:56
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A critique I forgot to mention in my previous post is that I feel this would have benefitted from at least a few more moments of humor. Aside from a couple snarky comments, there was nothing.
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Nov 2, 2018 17:37
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I don't really view it as a happy ending but more like a venus flytrap situation. Like yeah they're happy at first but give it a few days before reality sets in.
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Nov 3, 2018 01:18
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moths posted:The flaper ghost's exposition felt like an afterthought, or a studio decision to make the show much less subtle. It would have made more sense to give us a one-off episode set in the 20s, but that would have required all-new sets. Poppy's whole character was a bit weird. She had the flapper thing going, but Mrs. Dudley said she worked for Poppy--"She was old, but just a crazy." So she didn't die in the 20s, she died as an old lady in the 60s or 70s. So why does she manifest in the afterlife with all the twenty-three skidoo schtick? It would be like a Gen X guy dying in 2050 as an old man becoming a ghost who wore flannel and quoted Nirvana lyrics. With the exception of Hugh who seemed to briefly manifest as his younger self, all the ghosts were as old as they were when they died.
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Nov 3, 2018 02:09
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Astroman posted:Poppy's whole character was a bit weird. She had the flapper thing going, but Mrs. Dudley said she worked for Poppy--"She was old, but just a crazy." So she didn't die in the 20s, she died as an old lady in the 60s or 70s. So why does she manifest in the afterlife with all the twenty-three skidoo schtick? It would be like a Gen X guy dying in 2050 as an old man becoming a ghost who wore flannel and quoted Nirvana lyrics. With the exception of Hugh who seemed to briefly manifest as his younger self, all the ghosts were as old as they were when they died. Weren't the Dudley's young?
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Nov 3, 2018 02:12
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Len posted:Weren't the Dudley's young? Ah, that's true. Still a bit odd that she was so stereotypically 1920s, but I suppose she was crazy too, so maybe she went around talking like that as an old lady in 1970 or whatever.
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Nov 3, 2018 02:19
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Astroman posted:With the exception of Hugh who seemed to briefly manifest as his younger self, all the ghosts were as old as they were when they died. They sort of alluded to this with the cane ghost (Hugh?) being a giant while he was a small man in life. The house lets you be whatever you want to be, but in a bad way. Olivia gets to be a forever mom in her forever home, Polly gets to be a carefree childless flaper, etc.
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Nov 3, 2018 02:21
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I figured the reason Abigail and the still born were not any older was because they didn't live long enough to have an ideal them to be
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Nov 3, 2018 02:29
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Akuma posted:As someone who suffers from sleep paralysis with pretty similar symptoms that episode freaked me out more than a little bit. She wasn't there. I fully woke up a few moments later.
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Nov 3, 2018 04:47
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I used to get sleep paralysis and other weird hallucinations when sleeping/waking up from a medication I was taking, and this show got those experiences extremely right. Maybe my visions weren't quite as vivid as depicted, but seeing shadowy figures in your room is pretty standard. Another common one for me was feeling like I was sinking or being pressed down into my bed. I actually got so used to that one that it went from scary to oddly relaxing.
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Nov 3, 2018 05:11
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One of my biggest irrational fears is to wake up with someone just standing in my bedroom behind me, staring at me. This show did not do a lot for my ability to sleep. Especially so soon after reading Hex.
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Nov 3, 2018 05:13
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Is there any logic behind Nell's ghost sometimes appearing as the rotting bent neck corpse and other times as her normal self? Seems like it was just a choice to make her creepy until they didn't want her to be anymore. Also I think Theo should get her own comedy/drama spinoff.
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Nov 3, 2018 05:34
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Guiness13 posted:One of my biggest irrational fears is to wake up with someone just standing in my bedroom behind me, staring at me. This show did not do a lot for my ability to sleep. Especially so soon after reading Hex. Man half of Hex was really good. But that ending
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Nov 3, 2018 05:37
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Dolphin posted:I've always had sleep paralysis but benign, but then after watching this show by myself in the dark the other day I woke up paralyzed to my girlfriend walking into my room and leering over me with a dead face. So that was fun.
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Nov 3, 2018 07:35
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I wasn't a fan of this show, I'm afraid. I'll go through my reasons and remember it's fine to disagree: - The bits of Jackson-direct dialogue were badly at odds with the new stuff. I love the way Jackson writes. She has a poetic, daydreamy flourish to her writing. It got clipped up and pushed into parts of the script next to lines like, "It never occurs to them you'll be in this treehouse. You know, the one Dad built for you." The seams were distractingly apparent. ESPECIALLY in the last episode where a lot of the monolgues were entirely non-Jackson. Related to this is that the book is from Eleanor's POV and Eleanor has a very childlike, fantastic way of looking at things. She's full of romance and wonder over the mundane because the mundane is all she has to fantasize over. So it's weird see beleagured, no-nonsense characters go off on these monologues full of gentle, romantic ideations that don't really sound like words or thoughts befitting them. - Jump scares. In my book, it's a hard cut accompanied by an overly-loud musical sting. There were a lot and I got startled, but I also get startled when someone opens my office door. My office is not scary and neither is a loud noise. - God, I didn't like these people. When they were at the wake and Theo was jumping all over why Steve's wife wasn't there, I expected someone to remind her that their dead sister's dead body is in the next goddamn room and maybe this doesn't matter right now, but no one did. And then they snapped at their dad for struggling with his words and made snarky comments about how Luke's gonna gently caress this up too, I bet! They just nitpicked each other until Nell's body got knocked onto the loving floor and they were reminded oh yeah, this is my dead goddamn sister's wake. AND WHAT DID YOUR POOR SISTER EVER DO TO YOU, HUGH? RAISED YOUR FIVE loving KIDS, THAT'S WHAT. LET HER GRIEVE, SHITHOLE. TWAT. - The red room was underwhelming and not really connected meaningfully to the young Theo/Nell/Shirley interaction. - I like the imagery of the cane man! I wish they didn't have the "go back and look under the bed" bit. The idea of a floating corpse going down the hall, checking the rooms at night is great because there's so much you don't know and have to be worried about. When he found Luke, nothing really happened. It didn't attack him like the dumb waiter thing or... anything, really. The consequence of being caught was that Luke was scared, but more. - I didn't like the ghosts being characters. Humanizing them gave you expectations for them and establishing knowns for your monsters makes them less threatening. Ghosts are scary because they represent so much of the unknown. You became less afraid of Santi in The Devil's Backbone when you learned his story. You became more afraid of Samara in The Ring when you learned her backstory didn't matter and you had wrongfully tried to apply humanity to something that lacked it. I know Grannie ghost is chill and Poppy lies because they flat-out tell us that, and now I'm removed from sympathizing with Liv. And Poppy showed up like a Big Bad, just in the next to last episode with no foreshadowing. - The last episode is anime. When I was fifteen, I watched Inu-Yasha and there was an episode like this. All the characters get trapped in a magic miasma the villain makes and they hallucinate their worst nightmares while vines try to consume them. Only through the power of friendship and love are they able to break away from the spell, and also like Nell one of them has special powers to help everyone else snap out of it. That poo poo flew when I was fifteen, dammit, but now I'm thirty and I should not be thinking about Inu-Yasha, Hill House! - Agreeing that the happy ending tone was bad, and it was a happy ending. The dialogue might tell me Megan Fox is not a sex object, Micheal Bay, but you nullify it when you jam the camera up her rear end. You may say it's a trap ending, but the camerawork, editing, audio, lighting, acting and dialogue are all saying it's happy. If you wanted to make me think otherwise, you would have made even just one of those things dissonant. - Abigail was a pointless twist and pretty unnecessary as a character. But book reference, I guess. - And last one is a nitpick. Like, I know it's a nitpick and it's really unfair. But that is not how someone dies from rat poison. It is so much longer and it is so much worse. And I know exactly why they had to shorthand it because I also know this is an unfair gripe. I just noticed. That was a longer post than I meant to make it. Also I took some Benadryl and I'm passing out now. G'night!
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Nov 3, 2018 09:30
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I used to get sleep paralysis when I lived alone in a creepy old house. Would wake up, unable to move, with a feeling of absolute dread and the idea there was some...thing in the room with me. Two things made it go away--it happened in a modern hotel, which couldn't have been haunted, and I also found out it was a common psychological condition. Never had a problem again. Das Boo posted:.- I like the imagery of the cane man! I wish they didn't have the "go back and look under the bed" bit. The idea of a floating corpse going down the hall, checking the rooms at night is great because there's so much you don't know and have to be worried about. When he found Luke, nothing really happened. It didn't attack him like the dumb waiter thing or... anything, really. The consequence of being caught was that Luke was scared, but more. I'm a whore for exposition and I kept wanting to hear the backstory of the ghosts and the house, but I cannot deny the truth of what you said here. The scariest ghost remains the dumbwaiter cellar one, who was a scrabbling dervish of mindless evil with no name. If all we had seen of Hazel was her evil grinning in the background, or if William's only appearance had been the room checking sequence, or Poppy had wordlessly disappeared after appearing succubus-like over sleeping Hugh, they would have much more effective. Astroman fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Nov 3, 2018 |
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Nov 3, 2018 10:59
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SweetMercifulCrap! posted:Is there any logic behind Nell's ghost sometimes appearing as the rotting bent neck corpse and other times as her normal self? Seems like it was just a choice to make her creepy until they didn't want her to be anymore. the show forgot it was telling a spooky story about the lingering effects of trauma and became a heartwarming family adventure Astroman posted:The scariest ghost remains the dumbwaiter cellar one, who was a scrabbling dervish of mindless evil with no name. If all we had seen of Hazel was her evil grinning in the background, or if William's only appearance had been the room checking sequence, or Poppy had wordlessly disappeared after appearing succubus-like over sleeping Hugh, they would have much more effective. I thought the cellar ghost was chillingly effective when it was just an arm appearing from behind some crates and Luke screaming for his sister to pull him up. Then it kept happening and the camera remained focused on the creature until it lost all its horror and instead became a guy in a suit. QuoProQuid fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Nov 3, 2018 |
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Nov 3, 2018 16:28
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Just finished watching the show - overall I liked it, although it feels pretty conflicted... At first I wanted more scary ghost moments, because they're clearly selling this as a scary ghost show. But then you soon realize it's actually a show about family, memory, how the "ghosts" of the past can follow you through life, etc, and as the true themes of the show become apparent, the spooky scary moments feel increasingly irrelevant. The flapper ghost feels especially at odds with the plot; an evil ghost character that's not related to the Crains just confuses the theme.
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Nov 3, 2018 17:13
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QuoProQuid posted:I thought the cellar ghost was chillingly effective when it was just an arm appearing from behind some crates and Luke screaming for his sister to pull him up. It's stuff like this where I'm not sure if the director was trying to go for horror or not. There were tiny jump scares in the beginning of the show but it showed the ghosts so much that I don't think they were there to be scary. Makes me think they showed the whole ghost in the basement to drive in the point that Luke saw some scary, traumatic poo poo.
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Nov 3, 2018 17:32
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It kind of over-sold the bootlegger basement, though. It drove home Theo's gifts and that the blueprints were wrong, but there was never any mutilated gangster corpse or anything down there. It seems like there are way more ghosts in Hill house than there ought to be, now that I'm thinking about it.
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Nov 3, 2018 20:22
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I thought for the longest time that the girl that played young Theo was the same one that played Laura in the Logan movie. Both just seem to have the natural ability to seem pissed off all the time.
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Nov 3, 2018 20:43
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Dumb aside, I was surprised to find a bottle of Homestead Creamery in Shirley’s fridge. It’s a local Virginia farm and their egg nog is good poo poo! I know some of the filming was done in Georgia, maybe they distribute that far south.
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Nov 4, 2018 03:50
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Wait. So if Abagail was buried in the woods before Hugh called the police, why did the detective ask about the “other body”?
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Nov 5, 2018 06:44
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Ogmius815 posted:Wait. So if Abagail was buried in the woods before Hugh called the police, why did the detective ask about the “other body”? Mr. Hill in the basement.
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Nov 5, 2018 07:04
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Astroman posted:Mr. Hill in the basement. That doesn't make any sense though. Why would they need to discuss that? There's no way Hugh could have possibly had anything to do with it.
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Nov 5, 2018 16:12
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It didn't make any sense to me at first - but in retrospect, the officer is threatening to un-"keep this quiet" about Mr Hill. He's trying to leverage their previous resolution to get him to cooperate.
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Nov 5, 2018 17:16
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So yeah. Episode 6. It’s an incredible feat of filmmaking and cinematography. Mike Flanagan tweeted a thread about how they accomplished it: https://twitter.com/flanaganfilm/status/1059105688541118464?s=19 (Click embedded tweet for more) Turns out there were no hidden edits. 51 minutes of the episode were composed of only 5 shots, with one of them topping a whopping 17 minutes. I suspect that Theo falling when trying to sit on the couch was not intentional but they rolled with it.
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Nov 5, 2018 17:57
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moths posted:It didn't make any sense to me at first - but in retrospect, the officer is threatening to un-"keep this quiet" about Mr Hill. Yeah I buy this.
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Nov 5, 2018 18:16
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I haven’t finished the show as of right now, and while it isn’t perfect there is a bunch of stuff I love and I wish more horror directors would take note of. The shot in the funeral parlor where Hugh is talking and it pans around and Nell is just standing there in the back, no jump scares but just this uneasiness of her hanging around. gently caress that’s good. I’m going to have to rewatch the whole show and never pay attention to the main action now.
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Nov 6, 2018 04:36
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SweetMercifulCrap! posted:I suspect that Theo falling when trying to sit on the couch was not intentional but they rolled with it.
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Nov 6, 2018 07:14
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