Showrunner and EP Meredith Averill on Netflix’s Hit ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and Upcoming Series ‘Locke & Key’ [Exclusive Interview]

The Haunting of Hill House was one of 2018’s biggest and most talked-about shows. While attending the ATX Television Festival this summer, I had the opportunity to speak with Meredith Averill, a television writer and producer on the hit Netflix series.

Averill, who served as both the co-showrunner and an executive producer on The Haunting of Hill House, additionally wrote two of the first season’s most critically acclaimed episodes: “The Bent-Neck Lady,” which reveals the identity of the titular spirit, and “Screaming Meemies,” which reveals Olivia Crane’s ultimate fate and what really happened in Hill House.

“Mike Flanagan, who created the show, when he sold it to Netflix they were looking to take on a partner that had done television before, because he had only done filmmaking before,” Averill explained.

“[Flanagan] had some tent poles for the season that he knew he wanted to hit, and he always knew the story of the Bent-Neck Lady that we would drop — literally and figuratively! — in the middle of the season,” she continued.

According to Averill, her process when writing the episodes was to essentially take the show creator’s tent pole ideas and translate them to the page, resulting in an emotionally devastating episode that even affected the writers themselves.

“It was heartbreaking in the room to break [the episode],” she recalled. “We would say almost every day, ‘Gosh, this is just so mean!’ Victoria Pedretti, who portrayed Nell, is unbelievable — what a find. And your heart just breaks for her.”

The “drive” for the episode, the writer explained, was to show the progression of Nell’s deteriorating mental state and present the details of how she hung herself at Hill House “in a really surprising, heartbreaking, emotional way.”

“The last 12 minutes of that episode, every time I watch, I just lose it,” she said.

“I’ve been having to do a lot of apologizing to people when that show premiered, because they would just be like ‘I can’t sleep, and I’m crying!’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m sorry!'” Averill continued. “But I’m also so glad that the show had such emotional resonance for people. Horror gets a bad rap on TV, so it was exciting for all of us that what people glommed onto wasn’t just ‘Oh, it scared me’ but also it made me feel something.”

The Haunting of Hill House was Averill’s first real foray into writing within the horror genre. Previously, she worked on The Good Wife, Star-Crossed, and Jane the Virgin.

For Averill, it’s the story and not the particular genre that attracts her to a project.

“I’ve always been a huge horror fan, and I’m just a fan of variety also. Your career takes certain paths and I’m just drawn to story,” she explained.

“So whether it’s The Good Wife or Jane the Virgin, it was always what’s the best story. What’s going to draw me,” she continued. “My next show could be a medical procedural! If the story is what draws me there.” 

Regardless of that draw to story, Averill agrees that horror is having “a moment,” both in film and television.

“I don’t know if that’s because Get Out was such a smash success — both commercially but also the fact that it was nominated for Oscars,” she said. “I think that people are recognizing there’s elevated storytelling that can be done in horror and that can have something to say. And I think that’s super exciting. It’s an exciting time to be a horror fan.”

Despite penning two of Season 1’s most acclaimed episodes, Averill will not be returning to the upcoming second season of Netflix’s horror anthology, titled The Haunting of Bly Manor (based on the Henry James novella “The Turn of the Screw.”

Instead, Averill will be working on a new adaptation for the streaming service: the long-awaited Locke & Key, based on the comic book series of the same name penned by Joe Hill.

“Because of the way the timing worked out, I was elbows deep in Locke & Key — we’ve been in production since February,” she said. “[Haunting] kindly asked me if I’d come back, but […] we’re still in production on Season 1 of Locke & Key. I actually just came from Toronto yesterday, that’s where we’ve been shooting it.”

Averill called her new project — on which she serves as co-showrunner alongside Bates Motel creator Carlton Cuse — “a really nice transition” going from Haunting, “which was really quite dark and heavy,” to the more fantasy-driven, “Harry Potter-esque but a little bit more adult” Locke & Key.

“It was a little bit of a breath of fresh air to still have a toe dipped in horror, but there’s a lightness to Locke & Key that I’m enjoying a lot,” she said.

The new series, which will have a 10-episode first season, isn’t expected to debut on Netflix until early 2020. But so far, the creators of the original comic are loving the showrunners’ interpretation of their material.

“Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, who created the comic, they were just up on set and they were so enthusiastic about it. And it’s amazing to have them embrace the adaptation of it and the changes that we’ve made,” Averill said.

“That was really the biggest compliment we got was that they loved it. Because you’re always nervous — you want them to love it! And Joe’s just over the moon.”

As for future projects, Averill revealed that she has one dream adaptation in mind.

“I would love to re-develop Nightmare on Elm Street for TV,” she said. “In fact, one of the executives at Warner Bros., I email every few months to ask if it’s available because it’s tied up in film — because they may be making a [film] reboot of it, I’m not sure, I think because Halloween did so well.

“I would love to find a way to modernize and update Nightmare on Elm Street, because it’s the franchise that made me a horror fan,” she continued. “I think there’s something there.”

—

The Haunting of Hill House is streaming on Netflix. Locke & Key is expected to premiere on Netflix in early 2020.

Check out all of our coverage of the ATX Television Festival right here. There is still more to come!

 Follow us on Twitter! 

Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!