The opening lines of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece set the mood:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

In 1959, eleven years after the appearance of her gripping short story “The Lottery,” Jackson hit her stride with The Haunting of Hill House. Her distinctive use of dramatic tension based on character, stress, and dread drove the story, and the novel’s long form was both ambitious and compelling. To this day, readers glance up from its pages to check a room’s dark corners. Some, when alone, soon put the book down until they have someone else in the house. At least, someone else they know is supposed to be there. 

It was an unlikely book to catch on. The basis for the story is formulaic, the sort of thing pitched with one line at a movie studio: “Haunted house terrifies occupants.” In most of these stories, the reason people stay in a “haunted” house is simplistic, as when characters risk peril to collect an inheritance or win a wager. Almost all writers populate such stories with a lot of characters, so when they start disappearing — the gloved hand reaches around the potted palm and Millicent or Daphne exits the story, disappearances that frighten those who remain — there’ll be enough of them to carry the plot to a conclusion. It’s the stock and trade of the horror genre: the car that won’t start, someone fleeing from a bad to worse situation, and the victim who hasn’t a particle of peripheral vision.

Shirley Jackson, however, used these conventions while defying them. She reduced her cast to four people and set the situation for their interactions in a bewildering house with a sordid past and dark reputation. They are brought together by a legitimate paranormal researcher who plans to examine the functions of a “haunted house” by recruiting people uniquely qualified to observe them. But it gradually becomes apparent that each of these people, including the credentialed researcher, is psychologically vulnerable. His scientific bona fides are less critical than a troubled personal life. Likewise, the clairvoyant he recruits as part of the observation team is named Theodora and called “Theo,” which hints at a muddled sexuality that inclines toward lesbianism that, in 1959, made her an outsider. Theo’s cynicism and acerbic manner grate on the other members of the team, especially mild-mannered Eleanor, a pleasant woman pushing middle age and certain spinsterhood. She has been recruited because she experienced an inexplicable paranormal event as a child. But it turns out that Eleanor also harbors seething resentments toward her family and bears a crushing guilt because she hates them. Rounding out the group is the youthful heir to Hill House, a twenty-something highly amused by all the supernatural nonsense and interested only in protecting his lucrative legacy.  

.Jackson pits these flawed people against a formidable opponent in Hill House, which is unsettling because it is never apparent if there is something evil in the place or if the people themselves are the problem. Trying to “exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality” becomes a torment. They are tested during the night. The housekeeper tells them that as she departs for the village at sunset, nobody can hear them or help them at night. Hill House comes alive at night.

The story has been told on film thrice, the latest being a 2018 Netflix miniseries that “reimagined” Jackson’s novel, which is the euphemism for “lifted and changed it.” A 1999 remake completely missed Shirley Jackson’s point with gaudy special effects that turned her psychological thriller into a bombastic bomb. The best will always be the first, a terrifying movie made in 1963. Robert Wise directed The Haunting and wisely consulted Jackson about the plot, place, and people. Wise originally intended to tell a complicated story about mental illness, focusing on what happens at Hill House as a sort of collective insanity. Instead, he followed Jackson’s advice to make a classic horror story that is faithful to the book. The enormous British mansion Ettington Park, restored as a hotel in the 1980s, was used for Hill House’s exterior and filmed in infrared film stock to make it overpowering and forbidding. The studio sets for the interiors were heavily shadowed in high-contrast black-and-white and framed with unsettling camera angles and special lenses. The audience senses that the house is watching and waiting to choose its time. 

Thus, the titular house becomes as much a star as the actors who perfectly capture Jackson’s characters, especially Julie Harris as the fragile Eleanor. Harris was reportedly disappointed with her performance, but her frailty is potent, and Eleanor’s occasional outbursts of bad temper can instantly turn her from mouse to manipulator. Everyone is quite good, and though forced into the role by a contract dispute, Russ Tamblyn, as the flippant young man, builds a character whose initial skepticism about the experiment makes what happens during the story even more disturbing. 

And it is disturbing. No floating ghosts wisp about, and the one supernatural visual effect of a heavy wooden door bending could be in the imaginations of terrified characters. Nothing slashes, and no one bleeds. Instead, the house is first revealed as odd and then evil with sound, suggestion, and implication. Some of its quirks are explicable, as when all doors slowly shut themselves by design, for they have been deliberately hung a bit off plumb. Nobody gets used to this, though, which makes inexplicable occurrences even more troubling. Some are terrifying, as when Eleanor and Theo huddle in their isolated bedroom, listening to a distant, rhythmic pounding. Something seems to be violently striking a remote wall of the house. The pounding comes nearer, recedes, and then resumes its slow and steady approach as if searching. Its ear-shattering volume shakes their room as it reaches their door. All goes quiet. The doorknob moves slightly. Eleanor’s voice is flat and matter-of-fact when she says, “It’s found us.”

The question remains what “it” is, which is the real terrifying power of Hill House and the haunting that purports to infest it. Is it in the minds of these people? Or is it something in the house that mounts a horrible assault on their senses? Could the house itself be evil, something more than an architectural oddity where doors remain sensibly shut because their jambs are deliberately out of plumb? It is, after all, a place of the night, and whatever walks there wants to walk alone.

Shirley Jackson died two years after the premiere of The Haunting. Her imagination found fear in the ordinary and conjured entertaining stories of dread born of human frailty, of people as well has houses holding darkness within. It is easy to see why she was plagued by unsettling thoughts and veiled specters and understandable that she took a variety of medicines to cope. One night, she went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Her heart, they said. Shirley Jackson was only 48.