The Haunting of Bly Manor: Every Ghost Story is a Love Story
“You said it was a ghost story; it wasn’t. It was a love story.”
“Same thing, really.”
Mike Flanagan’s much anticipated The Haunting Of Bly Manor, the follow-up to his smash-hit Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, is firmly in the tradition of gothic horror. Stories within these traditions are stories of love and loss, such as an old, creaking haunted house that attracts broken people. Gothic horror is also defined by the romance at the core of its stories: gothic tales are ones of obsession, forbidden love, and the macabre. Considering the series is adapting one of the most famous stories within the gothic tradition, Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, the nature of the storytelling comes as no surprise. Yet the way that Flanagan uses the bones of the story and the trappings of the sub-genre to explore his own unique style of horror. The result is a profoundly beautiful and empathetic journey into the supernatural, determined to make us reflect on the deeply tragic experience of being human and everything that comes with that.
The story begins as a relatively straightforward adaptation of The Turn of the Screw (a story already masterfully adapted in 1961’s The Innocents and rather messily in the 2020 film The Turning). After a few opening scenes setting up a framing device at a wedding, we are thrown into the meat of the story. A new American au pair is hired to care for two young (and traumatized) orphaned children, named Flora and Miles, at an old estate in rural England. Their last governess drowned herself in the lake of the estate. The new au pair (played with stunning emotional vulnerability by Hill House standout Victoria Pedretti) begins to witness strange glimpses of unexplainable figures. There appears to be something dreadfully wrong with these children…
There are other characters as well. There is the emotionally detached uncle, seemingly more interested in the alcohol he mixes with his tea than the fate of his niece and nephew, whom he is the guardian of after their parents’ demise. The housekeeper Hannah (T’Nia Miller) seems pre-occupied, drifting through her existence with an evident longing for something missing in her life. There is a charming cook named Owen (Rahul Kohli), who stays at Bly despite longing for a better life to care for his ailing mother. Then there is Jamie, the gardener who cares for plants and prefers them to people (Amelia Eve). One thing unites all these characters: tragedy and pain. They are all running from something, stalked by their pain and regret, and cornered within the massive yet claustrophobic walls of Bly Manor, which channels and amplifies that pain for its own ends.
There are rumblings and offhanded mentions of the previous au pair Rebecca, who committed suicide, the scoundrel Peter who broke her heart. You would swear you saw glimpses of them, as you would many other spirits, lurking around every corner. Mike Flanagan pulls from the same bag of tricks he used to create terror in The Haunting of Hill House, where ghosts often lurk in the shadows, backgrounds of shots, or peer around corners. It rewards an attentive viewer with even more scares and creates this lurking sense of paranoia and danger, where even when everything seems calm there is the possibility of threats. There are many ghosts in Bly Manor, fueled by the same fear, pain, and regret that plague the other characters.
The titular Bly Manor is this sprawling, creepy estate filled with uncanny statues, creepy hedges, and fog that feels like it will seep through every crack in the place. Thanks to immaculate attention to detail in the production design, the very look of the estate drips with atmosphere and dread. Underneath all the beauty lies an inerrant sense of wrongness and danger to the grounds, like something unknown is watching, waiting for the right moment to act. The sound design and score add to this, creating a sinister atmosphere that extends into even straightforward dramatic scenes, of which there are many.
Even more than Hill House before it, The Haunting of Bly Manor is a deeply human drama first and foremost, as much of a tragic romance as it is a horror. It travels along at a leisurely pace and is unafraid to spend a significant amount of time without a scare, which pays off in spades because it lulls the audience into a sense of safety and also has taken the time to invest them in the safety of the characters, before using that against them when the terrifying moments play out. While this slow, measured pace and patience with its scares may alienate some viewers (especially compared to the roller coaster pace and constant scares of Hill House), it creates such an emotional investment for a viewer that is willing to go with it. The small hiccups or places where it drags a bit are far worth the wait.
What makes Bly Manor (and all Mike Flanagan projects really) stand head and shoulders above most horror fare is the endless empathy he shows for every character. As I mentioned before, this story is very much a romantic tragedy. Every character is haunted by their own metaphorical and emotional ghosts, loves lost, abandoned, or separated, and Flanagan is unafraid to show how these losses can turn even the noblest of people into monsters. Every ghost, even the most fear-inducing or monstrous, is a three-dimensional character by the end. No one here is born malevolent but is turned that way by years of mistreatment and pain. The daring choice to explore humanity in the inhumane and supernatural is a bold one and one that has lingered with me ever since the show finished.
One quote said by a character early in the show particularly sums up the whole experience: “to truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Horror and empathy are intertwined on a much deeper level than just “if you care about the characters, you will be more scared.” Horror is a genre about facing your trauma, your inner demons, and sometimes your literal ones.
Like the ghosts in Bly Manor, they are not just supernatural entities but manifestations of our own fears and needs. To face them is to perform an emotional exorcism, to emerge on the other side having survived, perhaps with even closure. Flanagan is deeply aware of this connection, and it is interwoven in all of his work, but particularly The Haunting of Hill House/Bly Manor. He knows that not every person will have a good outcome when facing our traumas, but we must anyway, because it is worth it. Because of love and the beauty of our connection with other people. It is worth the dangers of an unhappy ending. It is all we can do to make life worth living; facing the literal and emotional ghosts within Bly Manor and within es reminds us of the power of horror as a tool for empathy and a reminder that the sacrifices of love are worth the dangers that lurk along with it.