In my adult life, I’ve become a fan of the horror genre, but over the years have also become disillusioned at most of the horror films and TV shows that try to scare in the same old tired ways.
This post contains spoilers for the show. Don’t read this post if you don’t want to be spoiled.
So I was blown away by the first episode of The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. I screamed out loud, I had to cover my eyes in places and I had trouble sleeping that night. And I watched the first few episodes in much the same way, but by episode four, The Twin Thing, I was physically affected by the floating man following Luke and the very end of episode five, Bent Neck Lady, brought on a full-blown post-traumatic stress episode. I cried and could not catch my breath and all I kept saying was “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it”
And what scared me more than anything was that I didn’t know why it affected me so much.
I have suffered from post-traumatic stress for about 20 years. I’ve been in therapy for about as long, too. This one-hour episode of television affected me so deeply that I cried for hours and the next morning could not stop shaking as I thought about the Bent Neck Lady and all she represented, not only for Nell, but for me.
Why did she scare me so much? I think it’s because in the moments that Nell dropped into her past and realized who the Bent Neck Lady was I was consumed by some worry that this was Nell’s eternity, to drop through time … forever. I mean in a very literal way, Nell was being tormented by herself. She was terrified of herself and her own ghost without even knowing, but even as Nell realized that once she died, she seemed to cry and feel so sad that she couldn’t say to her younger self “Don’t be afraid, it’s only me.”
I’ve spent days working through this and the only thing I can come to is that this episode triggered my own intense fear of dying. I like to learn about things and new situations so I know what to expect. You could say, I like to be in control and this is something I’m very much NOT in control of. And there is nothing I can do about it. No one can help me and tell me what it’s like when we die. People’s near-death experiences aside, no one really has any idea what happens and the not knowing terrifies me.
When I was a kid, my mom created a monster called Igor to keep me in line. Igor was under the bed, in the closet, and always watching. If my mom had a headache and needed to lay down, she told me to go to bed and watch out for Igor because “he would eat me if my feet even touched the floor and made any noise.” When she wanted me to stay in my room and be quiet, I had to be mindful that Igor was in the closet watching me and reporting back to my mom if I misbehaved. Later, when I didn’t quite fall for Igor, my mom made up Igor’s wife Eleanor. She was meaner and had eyes in the back of her head.
Couple that with my Mormon upbringing and the idea that we had to be so good, that God was watching us and judging our worth and we had to do everything just so and make good choices or we wouldn’t be in heaven with our families forever and I had a twisted sense of death, goodness, ghosts, and evil.
On the one hand, I had this childlike image that in death we would all be on puffy clouds hovering above Earth waiting for our family to join us. On the other hand, I was told that heaven would be a wondrous gathering where we would all sit all day and listen to Joseph Smith preach from the eternal pulpit and that sounded like hell to me. The puffy clouds I could get behind, but sitting on a puffy cloud and listening to an eternal sermon. No thank you! Hell, please?
But even as a kid I was confused by the concept of time and eternity and how it all worked and if my very consciousness went out into the universe or the Mormon heaven after I died, how would I stand to live that way forever. I mean forever! And Ever! I worried I would go crazy and how would I cope with “living” in whatever way my soul carried on forever.
My thoughts on death and dying and my fear of eternity broadened as I got older and I tormented myself even while wide awake thinking about eternity and what I would do with all that time after I died. I would end up pacing in my room and crying and then screaming so much that I was unable to even catch my breath.
Which brings me back to Nell and her fear of the Bent Neck Lady. Nell’s parents told her that the things she was seeing were “spills” of her dreams into reality. Was my intense fear of dying a “spill” of my own fear of Igor and Eleanor? Or a spill of my own terror at trying to reconcile time and eternity?
How did Bent Neck Lady Nell feel knowing that she was dropping through time scaring herself? And how terrifying that she couldn’t stop it. It was too late. And as she cried and realized that she was her own worst nightmare she couldn’t even speak to calm little Nell. That was her eternity.
It scared me so deeply and so profoundly and I cannot say anything other than it seriously messed me up. It brought up every terrifying nightmare from my past and I revisited all my fears of dying and eternity in the last minute of that episode.
At first, I was comforted that Nell saw Arthur again and the beautiful song by Patty Griffin, Heavenly Day, was playing. That’s one of my favorite songs in all the world and it played at my wedding, but then in her beautiful dance through Hill House, Nell was overtaken by death. It just all snuck up on me so quickly and what at first were happy-ish tears that Nell and Arthur were back together became tears and screams of a panic attack.
I have never experienced an overlap of fiction and my real life like this. I have never felt something so powerful as the fear the Bent Neck Lady filled me with. My own fear of dying layered with her eternal torment and all that represented for me was so incredibly powerful.
Even as I write this a few weeks after watching that episode, I am upset and still processing. I’ve been told I’m not the only person scared of death, but that doesn’t comfort me because it still doesn’t help me understand and work through why it affects me so much. I know it’s a combination of wanting to control the outcome, which I can’t do, and yet being unable to fully accept that I have no control.
The only solution I see is to give everything I have to this life that I’m living right now so that no matter what, when it’s my time to go I’ll know I did everything I wanted. I won’t have any regrets and I won’t need to look back and wish I’d done something differently.
I can only go forward, right? And I can only do my very best to be happy, fulfilled, to love deeply and cherish all of it because I have no idea when it will all end and the only thing I’m almost certain of is that I won’t get a second chance to do any of it again.
“Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway,”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House