Netflix's tendency to drop entire seasons of TV shows at once has both positives and negatives. Sure, nothing feels better than spending a day blowing through a fresh batch of new episodes of your favorite show. But on the other hand, nothing feels worse than becoming obsessed with a new show after marathon-watching it all day, and then realizing there's no Season 2 anywhere in sight. Having said that, will there be a second season of Netflix's The Haunting Of Hill House?
The Haunting Of Hill House is a 10-episode horror series dropping on Netflix on Oct. 12. The show weaves together the genres of horror and family drama, resulting in a terrifying interpretation of just how scary the supernatural can be. The story is loosely based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel, also titled The Haunting Of Hill House, according to Den of Geek. Given the fact that the book doesn't have a sequel, a second season would require creating a whole new story, since there won't be any more source material.
However, not having another book won't necessarily stop Netflix from renewing the show. As PopSugar pointed out, shows like The Handmaid's Tale, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Big Little Lies, and 13 Reasons Why were all renewed for additional seasons that extended beyond the original books.
That being said, Netflix's The Haunting Of Hill House changed so many details from Jackson's original story that not having another book to work off of may not matter at all. In the novel, four people — an occult scholar; his assistant; a young woman who has experience dealing with poltergeists; and the heir to Hill House — all stay over at Hill House together in search of the supernatural, according to Amazon. But in the Netflix adaptation, creator Mike Flanagan makes a pretty huge change. Instead, the main characters are a group of five siblings, the Crains, who spent a summer living at Hill House as children. Years later, four of the siblings return to the home after one of the five dies of suicide, and they are forced to face the ghosts of their childhood.
The show has a unique structure, going back and forth in time, alternating between scenes of the siblings as children staying at Hill House and their reunion as adults. The first five episodes are each told from the perspective of one of the siblings, and the sixth is a bottle episode in which all five are finally reunited. The uncommon narrative devices Flanagan uses in The Haunting Of Hill House would definitely open the show up to another season, because it opens the story up to so many possibilities.
Additionally, there's always the possibility of Flanagan adapting The Haunting Of Hill House into an entirely other story with a new set of characters for a second season, `a la True Detective. So just in case a second season never happens, you should probably try to space out your viewings of The Haunting Of Hill House's 10 episodes — but if you do watch them all in one day, I promise I won't judge you.
