If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember that I’m really awful at writing reviews. My brain just isn’t analytical in that way, which is why I have five ratings I use for my Movies I Watched list in my bullet journal.

• Ugh
• Meh
• Good
• SO Good
• OMG

So I’m not good at reviews, but I want to say a couple of things about The Haunting Of Hill House, a miniseries from Netflix. First, let me say it got an OMG in my bullet journal. Now I’ll fumble around a couple of reasons why…

I’ve never really watched a lot of horror movies. I read tons of horror when I was younger, but movies never worked as well for me. And I left the genre almost entirely when it became more about the blood and gore than the hair standing up on the back of my neck. For me, it’s the unseen that’s truly terrifying. For example, Sixth Sense scared the crap out of me, until they started actually showing the dead people on the screen.

I didn’t really have any intention of watching The Haunting of Hill House, but I heard so many good things and it’s Halloween week, so I hit play.

Good lord, what an excellent, creepy, engrossing, terrifying series.

Exceptional writing. Exceptional directing. Exceptional acting. Exceptional setting. It’s pretty freaking exceptional all around.

No cheap jump scares. No cuing of dramatic music before the cat jumps out of the cupboard to make everybody laugh. The setting is perfect. The makeup and effects are chilling and so real, which matters to me. (See: Sixth Sense.)

This isn’t the kind of horror that mostly has the audience rolling their eyes and then occasionally jumping or screaming when whatever it is flashes on the screen. This is the kind of horror where you spend the time between flashes of terror sitting so still and tense that you don’t realize how scared you are until you try to move and your muscles are tight from the sustained tension.

The exceptional characterization (I’m just going to keep using exceptional, because it is) and acting makes the relationships between the sibling group so engrossing, the actual haunting becomes almost a secondary storyline. (Almost.) This isn’t a story about a family who spent some time in a haunted house but got out and whew, that happened. This is a story about how Hill House truly haunts this family.

Brilliant story.

Creepy af.

Seriously, you should all watch it. Because OMG.