I haven’t slept properly in over a week now. The reason is a Netflix show called “The Haunting of Hill House” (yes, I am currently watching a string of Netflix gems – welcome to the new era of viewership). The horror show has completely metamorphosed my nightmares and my home (which is ironic in a way because nightmares, and the central house of the title, are both important elements in the drama).

I have started dreaming again, after an extremely long period of dreamless nights. In my mind, floating in the sea of unconsciousness, I see storylines being played out where I am a ghost, floating at my own funeral-pyre and screaming at my family members like an angry poltergeist. I dream of myself in an ocean, watching a young man next to me struggle and then sink into the watery depths. I see scenes of the anger within myself unfurling like a snake and lashing out at people who are close to me. My dreams, it seems, are reflecting the themes of “The Haunting of Hill House,” a show filled with various forms of death, ghosts, violence, and betrayal.

My own house too has learned some tricks of its own. The sleep paralysis I experienced as a child has returned to haunt me during the nights. Like one of the show’s central characters, Nell, I become immobilised in my bed at night and the clothes piled in a corner of my room turns into a slumping woman or a floating man. My little alarm clock looks, out of the corner of my eye, like the head of a child. There is often a scratching sound that emanates from my doorframe. There are cold spots in my bed. The plumbing of the shower makes hissing sounds. Once, I swear, I heard whispers outside my room. My house, like Hill House, might be alive.

Of course, the more logical scenario is that my mind, riddled with the fear evoked by the show, has started to alter the common everyday scenes and sounds and happenings to frightful and disturbing illusions. It is all in my mind, and it is all because of “The Haunting of Hill House.”

This brings us to an important conversation that needs to be made about art and the psyche. How can there still be people in the world who deflect art as being nothing more than fanciful imaginings and pretty pictures, when art (films and novels and paintings) have the power to alter our very perception of the real world? How can art be disregarded when genres such as horror have the power to dictate how we live our lives?

How can people not see the ability of the arts to influence us when art itself seeps into our sleep and darkens our dreams? It is a strange thing, to have a fictional television show interrupt so many aspects of my life – and now that I sleep with my lights on, I reflect on the fact that I have had several nights of insomnia because of a piece of art that writers, a director, and many talented actors came together to create.

The horror exuded by “The Haunting of Hill House” is at once both fresh and familiar. The humanness of the ghosts casts a chilly hold over anyone who watches the show. We are transfixed because they are so like us – human in form – and yet so unlike us, with their pale skin, dark eyes, and eerie expressions. Also, the kind of horror the show relies on is of the kind that includes jump-scares, but, like the Shirley Jackson novel on which it is based, the show includes various elements of terror rather than horror.

This means, that there is not much blood and gore, but there is still a myriad of spine-tingling moments, whether it’s through random sounds that the principal family hears, the creaking of doors, spectres floating through hallways, time-jumps, a shift in certain characters’ personalities, etc. The kind of fear that “The Haunting of Hill House” imparts to the viewer is the kind that makes your blood run cold. It is not the horror-porn brand of terror where blood is spewed in copious amounts and limbs are hacked off. “The Haunting of Hill House” affects you psychologically, injecting rather than brandishing the fear it brings.

Of course, any evaluation of horror would require a clear focus on the subjects who experience the horror – in this case, the Crain family (parents and their five children) who move into the haunted Hill House one summer. In the battle between good and evil, there is usually, in horror movies, representations of goodness and innocence that get into conflict with the supernatural. In this case, the Crain family represents goodness – with all of the potential that goodness has for being transformed into evil.

The family plays a significant part of the film’s portrayal of fear, especially because, in an unusual manner for a horror show, there are many important themes (relationships, depression, sorrow, etc.) that are tied into the overall horror element that runs through the film, which needs to be thoroughly analysed in forthcoming articles, if one is to ever get a full and total understanding of how horror exists and operates through the terror that is found in “The Haunting of Hill House.”