Honestly, I don’t see what makes HoHH a good house, either. If we’re comparing the protagonists of it with the protagonists of other shows or films in other houses, I think there are a few differences.
ST and GB were meant to be crowd-pleasers and “fun” houses, in my opinion, so the reliance on scares already wasn’t there. I feel like that’s not a great move for the average HHN fan, but it was successful for Universal. Those characters are also extremely fleshed out and directly interact with the things that are meant to instill any real “fear” in those houses.
Unpopular opinion, but I liked Us; I think that the non-Tethered worked best because we’d already seen their Tethered counterpart first and understood the threat behind that character. Also along those lines, all of the non-Tethered were in immediate mortal danger, meaning that their appearances were not shoved in for the sake of needing a new jumpscare by yelling dialogue at us.
To be honest, I don’t think that HoHH could do these things. It’s such an emotionally-driven show, arguably before it’s horror-driven. It is difficult to portray emotions in a house, and even if it’s done right, it still has to be blink-and-you’ll-miss-it so that it doesn’t impact scares (I found the baby skeletons in the cribs in Seeds of Extinction to be especially tragic, for example). Taking out the emotions, there is no story to establish for HoHH. All we have left are some siblings and a lot of ghost jumpscares. If someone were to actually write out their ideas for how scares could work and a coherent story could be told, I’d love to read it, but I can’t see it at all. I really admire Universal’s ability to come up with complex yet palpable stories for its originals, so I don’t want to see them just make this a “ghost house.”
(It’s been a long time, but I’m back from the dead !! Hello again, forum!)