The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Netflix has been launching one hit show after another, and adding a whole lot of our favourite non-Netflix originals to their library as well. They are relentless in their pursuit of becoming the number one streaming platform, and we couldn’t be happier with that. Next up is a new horror show by the name The Haunting of Hill House, set to launch on October 12^th.

The Haunting of Hill House is inspired by Shirley Jackson’s classic horror novel of the same name, and is a modern re-imagination of Jackson’s work. The episodes flash back and forth between the past and present, depicting a fractured family, and the horrors they faced in their old home. We had the chance to talk with a number of the stars about the show, and we got even more excited about it.

What we like about this show is how unique it is, compared to traditional horror TV shows or movies, and we share that with Michiel Huisman, who liked “that it wasn’t a straight up horror show, but also a family drama.” But creating something this complicated can get quite challenging, and Huisman felt that it wasn’t easy to keep track, and they often found themselves losing track of time and place. He added, “the biggest challenge came in episode 10, when there’s a reveal of something in the house that puts everything upside down.”

Due to all that back and forth in time, different actors have to play younger (or older) versions of their characters, such as Henry Thomas playing young Hugh Crain, while the older character is portrayed by Timothy Hutton. Henry says, “We worked pretty intensely in pre-production to get Hugh Crain lined up between us so there were no hidden surprises for either actors.”

Despite it not being even released yet, there is a huge amount of praise for the show. Oliver Jackson-Cohen says that they never knew if it would be that well received, especially since director Mike Flanagan is trying something completely unique. “Instead of following a horror formula where a family moves in to a house, awful things happen, they move out, he’s focused on what would happen to those kids. I think there’s something inherently fascinating about that, and that you can create a family drama within this genre and it still be scary, still be moving, and still be effective.”

After their work on this show, a lot of stars had praise for Netflix. Kate Siegel believes that “the genius of Netflix is that they’re really filmmaker friendly, they’re building their own method of making content and how you get that content.” She added, “Netflix really supports the vision, and I feel lucky to work with them.” Elizabeth Reaser is actually a fan of Netflix, she loves that it allows people to “binge and go crazy and stop life for a weekend and get sucked into a story.” She believes their success is to down to how “they’ve championed these great writers and directors, and they’ve supported all these different kinds of stories.”

But we think Oliver Jackson-Cohen summed it up pretty well when he made this statement: “This goes out on October 12^th, and you can [still] watch it in 15 years, you don’t have to watch anything immediately. And if a show is good and solid, I think that word of mouth keeps that show alive.”