Even in the pilot, each sibling represents a different response to trauma:
By the closing shot—Steven staring at an old photo of his family, all of them smiling in front of Hill House—we realize the house’s true haunting isn’t ghosts. It’s the fact that they were happy there, once. And that happiness is just as terrifying as the shadows.
The pilot of The Haunting of Hill House is a masterclass in modern Gothic horror. It elevates the genre by treating the "haunting" as a metaphor for unresolved trauma. It is beautiful, tragic, and genuinely terrifying.