Sorry Ms Jackson, this is for real.

Stephen King’s works have often explored possession and split psyches so it’s fitting that Rose Red, his most forthright haunted house story since The Shining sees him channelling the spirit of Shirley Jackson so very strongly. Originally conceived as a Stephen King scripted adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, the 2002 miniseries plays less like a ghost story in the Jacksonian mode and more like a gleefully grisly theme park ride through the Gothic subconscious. It’s King playing with someone else’s toybox and he’s having an absolute blast.

Rose Red wears its Hill House inspiration like a velvet cloak: a brooding Seattle mansion with impossibly commanding views and a bloody, unexplained history, now lies abandoned, dormant and defiant. Professor Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis), a parapsychologist whose academic credibility is hanging by a thread, hatches a plan to assemble a psychic strike team to rouse the house and document the results, in collusion with the last surviving heir of the family who owns it. Her assembled paranormal avengers include Victor Kandinsky (Kevin Tighe), an ageing precognate with heart disease; psychometric Pam Asbury (Emily Deschanel); automatic writer Cathy Kramer (Judith Ivey); Nick Hardaway (Julian Sands), a telepath with remote viewing capabilities; and Emery Waterman (Matt Ross), a young post-cognate. They’re joined by Annie (Kimberly J Brown), a traumatised girl with reality-warping abilities the house seems to recognise and welcome. Determined to stop a potential embarrassment to his department, Doctor Carl Miller (David Dukes) sends college reporter Kevin Bollinger (Jimmi Simpson) ahead of the team to discredit whatever happens. What none of them realise is that none of them are going to end up investigating Rose Red so much as feeding it.

King’s teleplay stretches over three nights, luxuriating in the kind of slow-burn world-building that network television rarely afforded at the time. Director Craig R Baxley, veteran of Storm of the Century, handles the sprawl with confidence, balancing supernatural set-pieces with character-driven unease. The ensemble is large enough to staff a small university faculty, but performances are solid across the board. Nancy Travis makes Joyce a compelling mix of ambition and obsession, never an outright villain but clearly intoxicated to the point of dangerous obsession by the potential of becoming the woman who tamed a myth. Melanie Lynskey’s Rachel and Matt Keeslar’s Steve Rimbauer offer a grounded contrast to the house’s malevolence, while the late Julian Sands and Matt Ross deliver exactly the kind of haunted caricatures the material needs.

What makes Rose Red such a success is its commitment to excess. Where 1963’s The Haunting and even King’s own The Shining trafficked in restraint and ambiguity, Rose Red manifests every possibility. Ghosts aren’t glimpsed in passing; they loiter. Furniture doesn’t creak; it convulses. Doors don’t shut themselves; they slam open and shut with the frequency of a hormonal teenager. The house doesn’t merely come alive, it crashes out. King substitutes Jackson’s elusive psychological dread for his own brand of grand-guignol melodrama, and the shift works. This is horror built on accumulation: of rooms, of ghosts, of past wrongs and there’s an undeniable satisfaction in watching the author of The Shining reimagine the haunted house as a place that craves attention as much as it craves psychic sustenance.

Visually, the miniseries betrays its budget here and there and while some effects now have the plasticky sheen of early 2000s television, Rose Red itself is a triumph of production design. Its endless halls, stained glass, and sudden architectural inconsistencies give it a presence more compelling than more than a few of the actual characters. The house rightly becomes the main event: a delirious patchwork of decaying Victoriana, M C Escher architecture, and Pacific Northwest grunge. While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Robert Wise’s classic, it’s more than enough to cleanse the aura and exorcise the lingering phantoms of Jan de Bont’s star-studded 1999 CGI slop-fest.

Where King’s script occasionally overindulges; a monologue too many, a scene that stretches its point, it’s rescued by Baxley’s command of tone. Rose Red is unabashedly pulpy, but retains a likeable sincerity. Its pleasures lie in its excess: the extended runtime, the florid dialogue, the grand folly of doomed and dangerous curiosity and beneath the spectral spectacle lurks a neat meta-thrill; Stephen King in conversation with Shirley Jackson, rewriting her restraint into a maximalist echo chamber. Its homage as hagiography: the spiralling staircases, the psychic sensitives; the notion that architecture itself can go mad.

But Rose Red isn’t trying to be profound, it’s trying to be fun; a popcorn poltergeist party with ghost train thrills, and on that front, it succeeds far more often than it fails and far exceeds what early millennium television usually offered. This is King with his sleeves rolled up and the lights turned low, spinning a yarn less concerned with elegance than escalation. Two decades on, Rose Red holds up better than you might expect, less a product of early-2000s network horror than a ghostly bridge between eras: old-fashioned enough to honour its literary roots, modern enough to leverage some mid-budget digital theatrics to good effect.