How 'The Haunting of Hill House' pulled off that incredible 'Two Storms' episode
23 October 2018, 13:55
A behind the scenes look at the making of episode 6 shows the unbelievable efforts from the cast and crew.
Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House is a series full of incredible vignettes and brilliant storytelling. While the stories themselves are important, the blocking and composition of each scene can be essential to the mood of the episode. The Haunting of Hill House episode 6 is the most beautifully composed episode of the whole season and we bet you were wondering how exactly director Mike Flanagan, the cast, and the production team pulled the whole thing off.
Episode 6, Two Storms, seamlessly transports viewers between the funeral home and Hill House with impossibly long shots and elaborate sequences. Through out, you get a sense that some camera trickery must be at play (which, of course there is), but more than that, the episode was just incredibly well planned and rehearsed.
Netflix released a behind the scenes look at episode 6 and it will give you an even greater appreciation for how an episode like 'Two Storms' is put together.
The Haunting of Hill House | Featurette: The Making Of Episode 6 [HD] | Netflix
"We were doing 18 page scenes without any cuts," explains Mike Flanagan.
The set also had to be constructed with episode 6 in mind, knowing that they would have to follow the characters all over the house.
"Every shot was the product of 100 people standing on each others shoulders and having to execute dozens or hundreds of tasks," Flanagan says in the Netflix BTS featurette.
Not only did the actors have to deliver their lines flawlessly, unseen crew members were also on hand to move around props, equipment, and provide support for the carefully choreographed scenes. The longest scene in the episode was apparently 17 minutes long.
In an interview with Vulture, Flanagan elaborated further on the process. "We shut down the company for over a month to choreograph and rehearse each of our five long takes," he explained. "The longest was 17 minutes. There was no room for error at all, and if we made a mistake, we had to start over. We rehearsed for almost a month with our second team stand-ins before we even folded the cast into the process."
All that hard work definitely paid off. Episode 6 is certainly a revelation, demonstrating how engaging and gripping television can be.
