In 2018, the scariest things on TV were families.
IN 2018, THE MESSAGE WAS SIMPLE: THOSE CLOSEST TO US CAN HURT US THE MOST
We’ve heard it many times before: blood is thicker than water. No one will ever protect you, defend you or help you as unconditionally as your family.
The idea that they will always be there for you seems lovely. But it also sounds vaguely threatening. After all, no one can hurt you, destroy you or anger you quite like your family, either. And if television taught us anything this year, it’s there is no escaping the ghosts of family.
In Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, based on Shirley Jackson’s eerie tome, a family is haunted by itself. After moving into a new house that seems to harbour some kind of paranormal activity, the matriarch of the Crain family slowly grows unhinged, driven to the point of trying to murder her children. After her mysterious death, the children escape the house with their father, but find themselves haunted — both figuratively, and perhaps literally — by her memory. When they reunite, years later, they’re bonded by their shared trauma, but quickly discover that, although they’ve long abandoned their childhood home, their past has placed a permanent wedge between them. Simply seeing each other once again dredges up too many bad memories to cope.
In HBO’s Sharp Objects, a foreboding home again represents the wounds that are inflicted by family. We watch as reporter Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) returns to a small southern town to revisit her manipulative family while investigating the murder of two little girls. This one is a home haunted not by literal ghosts, but her mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson), stepfather Alan and half-sister Amma — all of whom seem to have been frozen in time, from their ’20s wardrobes to the home’s turquoise exteriors, swampy green wallpaper, four-poster beds and claw-foot tubs. It’s American Gothic at its eeriest. The family’s anachronistic esthetic gives the impression we’ve been pulled into the past, just as Camille feels tugged back to her traumatic childhood.
The Preaker house, much like the Crain Mansion, is a museum. It houses the truth about Camille’s sister, who mysteriously died when the pair were children, and it sees every scar Camille has carved onto her body. But it’s the replica dollhouse, built to scale with every single piece of furniture and art created to match in miniature, that haunts the most. It sits (and seemingly waits) in Amma’s room, keeping watch and taking notes as the mansion changes. The custodian of the mansion, the dollhouse, Amma and Camille, remains Adora. She tells Camille that she’s never loved her, that she takes after her estranged and presumably unlikeable father, and that she’s the one who has invited a bad influence into their home. Amma, however, young and still malleable, is her prized trophy. Amma can be controlled, Camille couldn’t. Camille escaped that house, but Amma won’t.
It’s a motherly but monstrous grip, and one the Crain children’s mother also holds, even after death. Their tools, it’s clear, are guilt and manipulation. But much the same way these mothers terrorize their children, we also see the patriarch in the HBO series Succession, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), terrorize his. In poor health, the media magnate wants the best for his children, but he also wants the best for his multi-milliondollar company. It doesn’t matter to Logan that Kendall, his eldest, may be the most primed for the job having followed in his footsteps. Just as Camille poses a threat to Adora because she could never control her, Kendall poses a threat to his father because of his independence. In both Sharp Objects and Succession, we watch as children move toward discovering their parents’ secrets, their weaknesses; Adora had more to do with her daughter’s death than realized, and Logan has accumulated a mountain of debt with his family none the wiser.
For the Roys, it’s the company that functions as the haunted home, repeatedly pulling them back and keeping them apart. But for the families of all three television series, the horror can’t be contained within four walls. It’s the legacy of the family that haunts their minds. Even as adults, the next generation is damned to be their parents’ children, destined to either drink the poison and follow in their footsteps or sever all ties and risk excommunication. It’s a dreary decision: become them or fight them; either way, they’ll leave scars. This pervading dilemma is why all of these series felt more like thrillers this year than conventional family dramas. Love, they preach, is doubleedged; it can end your career, your relationships and even kill you.
The greatest lesson from television in 2018 was that family is the ultimate villain. It gives birth to demons, cuts the deepest wounds, keeps us in destructive places and continues to live on in our nightmares.