2018’s The Haunting Of Hill House was acclaimed as an incredibly tense and incredibly creepy experience, drawing unrestrained praise from people as bloody-minded as Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino. While it was clearly a one-shot, the fans have been clamouring for more ever since – and now, with Netflix having confirmed a Fall release for spiritual sequel The Haunting Of Bly Manor, it’s finally within their grasp.
First look images for #TheHauntingOfBlyManor: pic.twitter.com/HifGGTqHBM
— Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) August 24, 2020
Showrunner Mike Flanagan, a veteran of such other horror projects as Doctor Sleep, Gerald’s Game, and Hush, has offered up some tantalising details about the upcoming Bly Manor, confirming that it’s based on Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, about a young woman who becomes the governess of two orphaned children and uncovers some unsettling family history in the process. Lest this sound like a retreading of the dynamics of Hill House, Flanagan is way ahead of you, noting “it was really important for all of us not to play the same notes we played for the first season. The first season is very much entrenched in family dynamics and death and grief and loss and child trauma. We all collectively felt like we’d said everything we wanted to say about that”.
Instead, the core of Bly Manor is broken hearts and doomed romances. Flanagan continued “It certainly provides a new way to tell a love story, and there are three of them that really beat at the heart of this season…that sense of romantic longing for someone who meant so much to us—but who’s gone—really is the heart of any ghost story.”
A number of the cast members from Hill House are returning for Bly Manor, but will be playing different roles – in some cases very different. Victoria Pedretti, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Henry Thomas and Kate Siegel are confirmed to appear again, with Pedretti taking on the governess role, and Jackson-Cohen, contra his vulnerable addict character in Hill House, here playing a charming manipulator.
Also returning, perhaps most notably, are the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them background ghosts which were a minor but prominent feature of Hill House. Per Flanagan, “The audience seemed to really like them. I loved watching people double back and try to find more of them…This season we wanted our hidden elements to tell their own story. And very much unlike the first season, they’re actually going to be explained. By the end of the season, you’re going to know who they are and why they’re there.”
But perhaps the most significant difference mentioned is in the titular houses. Whereas the original’s Hill House wasn’t at all shy about looking actively scary, like in James’s novella Bly Manor will be presented as a much more welcoming structure. The manager of the place, played by T’Nia Miller, apparently describes it as “a great, good place” – but it’s hard to imagine many of the viewers will be fooled for long. It is, after all, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, not The Completely Non-Spooky Happenings Of Bly Manor.
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