The Haunting Of Hill House: 10 Scariest Moments

Episode: 1x8 - Witness Marks

After the previous scare, the audience has time to catch its breath. Shirley's car veers off the road, and she follows Theo out of it as she makes her way to a field by it, where she explains her reasoning for trying to kiss Kevin.

By now, viewers are aware of Theo's psychic talent. By touching people, she can read their feelings, as well as gain impressions from inanimate objects. What she learns is too much to bear, however, so she's thankful when she's gifted a pair of gloves by her mum. She uses her gift - curse? - as an adult to become a successful child psychologist, and earlier in the series we see her horrified by what she feels when she touches Nell's dead body in the morgue. We don't learn what see saw or felt; we're just left with her howl of pain.

Theo now explains the sense of nothing, of numbness, that she's been feeling since touching her younger sister's corpse. What happens is the show suddenly pivots from supernatural horror to the existential. Up until this point, the evil forces working against the Crane family had been tangible (even if they are ghosts.) But by questioning what happens when we die, and Theo's absolute conviction that what she 'felt' might be indicative of that, we are invited to look beyond spectres and into the very absurd, nihilistic nature of death itself.

Ghosts don't exist. When an episode of the show ends, we can move on. But our inevitable demise is very really indeed, and something we can spend our lives meditating on.