A few months ago, I reviewed the much talked-about Netflix television show The Haunting of Hill House. And as requested, I’m back with a review of the follow-up season The Haunting of Bly Manor! Like Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor was created for Netflix by Mike Flanagan and it features many of the same actors, but it is not a direct sequel. Instead, while Hill House took on Shirley Jackson’s most famous novel, Bly Manor tackles the works of another beloved American author, Henry James. Loosely inspired by James’s ghostly novella The Turn of the Screw, with plot elements from a few of his other stories thrown in, the nine episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor debuted on Netflix on October 9, 2020—just in time to be the perfect mid-pandemic binge.
The Haunting of Bly Manor blends The Turn of the Screw together with two of Henry James’s lesser-known short stories: “The Jolly Corner” and “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” The series opens with a wedding guest offering to tell a ghost story to an attentive crowd gathered around a fire after the rehearsal dinner. She launches into a tale that centers on Dani Clayton, a young American woman who arrives in England to take on a job as an au pair to the wealthy Wingrave family. The young children, Flora and Miles, had been orphaned when their parents died in an accident abroad, and the previous au pair’s tenure recently ended in tragedy. Dani quickly becomes devoted to the two children and forms a close relationship with the other staff members. But it is clear from her very first day that something is terribly wrong at Bly Manor. A mysterious figure watches Dani through the windows. Muddy footprints track their way through the halls every night. And the children display a vast array of unnerving behaviors, from sleepwalking out onto the grounds at night to suddenly adopting very unchildlike mannerisms. Unlike in James’s original novella, however, these hauntings can’t be explained away as mere figments of the caregiver’s overactive imagination. Bly Manor is quite literally haunted—not just by Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, but by a whole houseful of ghosts that have accumulated over the course of centuries in the manor, due to a legacy of secrets and betrayal. The Haunting of Bly Manor is an even less faithful adaptation of the original work at hand than Hill House, and completely abandons the central notion of leaving the existence of the supernatural ambiguous. It is also less scary than the preceding season. But what Bly Manor lacks in jump-scares, it makes up for in heart.
The opening scenes of the Storyteller and the wedding party serve as a frame story for the ghostly narrative that follows. As I mentioned in an earlier post about stylistic tropes in Gothic literature, frame stories can be used to set up the text that follows as a found document, giving it a sense of credibility and distance from the actual author. But there is another popular framing device that is specific to the ghost story genre: presenting the story as an oral tale being told to entertain an audience at a social gathering. This narrative device mimics a real-world activity that, during the Victorian era, was a particularly popular way to spend the long, dark winter evenings around Christmastime. Henry James’s original text blends both types of framing devices: the story opens with a group of friends on Christmas Eve competing to tell the scariest ghost story when one man announces that he has a particularly dreadful one involving two children. Rather than telling the story out loud right then, however, he fetches a manuscript that was passed on to him by the governess in the tale. Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor goes with the more traditional oral-storytelling route, but ditches the Christmas setting. Instead, the circumstances of the frame story are changed to create a circular narrative that ties in to the ghost story at hand. Throughout the episodes, the Storyteller’s voiceover narration occasionally dips back in to provide commentary and remind us of the frame story. By the end of the final episode, the identities of the Storyteller and other members of the wedding party are revealed, and the telling of the ghost story in this context takes on new meaning. Indeed, the final moments of the last episode lead directly into the first scene of Episode 1, giving a sense that the story has come full-circle.
I mentioned above that this season is less scary than The Haunting of Hill House, but it is at times deeply unsettling. This is because rather than going for shock or gore, Bly Manor relies mainly on the uncanny. This concept is exemplified best by the ghosts that haunt Bly Manor. Apart from Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, the other ghosts in the house have one thing in common: they have no faces. They look just like living human beings, except that where we would expect to see eyes and a nose, they have only a smooth, featureless blur. The spectral figure that haunts Dani Clayton is similarly unnerving. Though his features haven’t been smoothed over, his eyes are blocked by the glaring light reflected in the round lenses of his glasses. This impression of large, glowing eyes makes it seem as though something alien or bug-like is looking out from an otherwise human face. These jarring deviations from the familiar human form place these apparitions squarely in the Uncanny Valley and contribute to creating a distinctly Gothic atmosphere.
What did you think of The Haunting of Bly Manor? Did you enjoy it as much as Hill House? What texts do you hope they tackle in future seasons? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!