If The Haunting Of Hill House gets another season, it won't be about the Crain family

Netflix’s The Haunting Of Hill House—like Hereditary and the new Halloween—is about how terrifying experiences and general spooky nonsense can ripple through a family and send trauma down through multiple generations, but if Hill House gets another season, it’ll at least let its central family off the hook. The first season of Hill House took place in a couple different time periods and revolved around the Crain family, which endured a series of traumatic events while living at the eponymous home and then became varyingly fucked up as the years passed. Their story has ended by the final episode of the season, and while Netflix hasn’t said whether or not Hill House will get another season, series creator Mike Flanagan still has some thoughts on what he wants to do.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan is careful to note that he doesn’t want to say anything definitive until Netflix and Amblin actually tell him they want another season, but he does declare that “the story of the Crain family is told.” In other words, he has no intention of going back and retreading similar ground with another story about what these people experienced in Hill House. Instead, he has ideas for “all sorts of different directions” the show could go in, either “with the house or with something completely different.” He also adds that he loves “the idea of an anthology,” so season two of The Haunting Of Hill House might not even be about a haunting at Hill House at all. That might be weird, given the title of the show, but maybe season two—if it happens—will just be The Haunting Of Some Other Thing.

Elsewhere in the chat, Flanagan discusses how the show pulled off its sixth episode, which was presented almost as a single, unbroken take. The way Flanagan tells it, filming the episode was actually wildly hilarious, with actors hiding under desks and crew members running behind the camera to position things in certain ways. He says they were planning the faux-unbroken take (it’s actually five long shots that were filmed across five days) from the very beginning, and so they were able to build the sets with that in mind—which explains the sequence where Timothy Hutton is able to walk from the funeral home directly into Hill House without the camera cutting away. Flanagan also teases that there are a number of little clues and hints in early episodes that foreshadow what happens in later ones, so we’ll have to be ready for that sort of secret whenever The Haunting Of Some Other Thing returns.