The End of The Haunting of Hill House May Have Included a Foreboding Twist

Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the Netflix original series The Haunting of Hill House, a modern reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name.

The Haunting of Hill House seemed to end on a somewhat happy note, with the surviving members of the Crain family appearing to resume their lives free of the demons that once haunted them. But according to Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who played adult Luke, there may have been a detail in the final montage of scenes that hinted at a chilling twist.

In a recent interview with The Wrap, Jackson-Cohen addressed a possible Easter Egg that suggests the show’s ending perhaps wasn’t as happy as fans thought.

“There’s this thing that happens when we’re all in the Red Room,” Jackson-Cohen said of the scenes in which each of the living Crain siblings experience a horrifying vision in the Red Room. “I feel like I have to be careful if I’m saying this right. But whenever each child, each sibling, is in the Red Room, something in the fantasy is red. And it’ll be a very, very small thing. For Luke, when Luke gets taken to the hotel room, he’s worn Converse throughout the show, and all of a sudden his Converse are red. And it’s so slight you can barely even see it. And I think Steven is wearing a red jumper [in his fantasy].”

Jackson-Cohen went on to explain how this detail could tie into the flash-forward scene in which Luke celebrates two years of sobriety with his siblings.

“And so there’s something at the end — it was Kate [Siegel], who plays Theo, who kind of pointed it out to me — with Luke’s sobriety cake,” he said. “She went, ‘The cake is red.’ And on set I went, ‘Oh, my God!’ And she went, ‘I don’t know!’ And I asked Mike [Flanagan], and he went ‘I don’t know.’ And so I can’t tell whether or not I’m just crazy with this — or whether or not it’s something that could have legs.”

The mysteries of the Red Room continue.