Steve Blackman’s comic book adaptation The Umbrella Academy and Mike Flanagan’s slow burning horror series The Haunting of Hill House don’t seem to have much in common other than the fact that they’re both massively popular Netflix shows that drew in huge viewership numbers, scored widespread critical acclaim and now find themselves positioned as two of the streaming service’s marquee television properties.
However, some striking similarities between the series have been pointed out, so much so that you could make the argument that they’re basically the exact same show except they take place in two different genres and timelines. For one, both have their plots set in motion by a death in the family reuniting a group of estranged siblings under the same roof for the first time in a long time, which eventually leads to them dealing with a series of revelations while ultimately growing closer as a unit.
The Umbrella Academy and Hill House also both feature central female characters who write tell-all books about their eccentric families, and each of them has a loose cannon brother dealing with drug addiction issues. Then there’s also a heavy ghostly element, with Klaus being accompanied by his deceased brother’s spectral form everywhere he goes in The Umbrella Academy, while Hill House has hidden ghouls in almost every frame to complement the many terrors at the heart of the story.
Beyond all that, there are the daddy issues as well, with the patriarch of both the Hargreeves and Crain families playing a major role in how dysfunctional the children turned out to be, and all of them grew up in a cavernous mansion. Of course, a lot of this is no more than a striking coincidence, but it appears that there’s definitely a unified approach in the setup, which managed to grab the attention of Netflix subscribers.