Classic horror literature and film are filled with stories about monsters: vampires, werewolves, mummies, etc. While all of these creatures can be terrifying, there may be nothing more frightening than when you find yourself inside a house that seems innocuous at first only to realize later that the house itself is a monster. The haunted house story embodies the best that horror has to offer: history, mystery, suspense, psychological intrigue, and the pervasive presence of the supernatural.
As surprising as it still seems, it was not a great horror writer such as Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft who first perfected the haunted house story but the great expatriate American literary writer Henry James, who at the time was merely dabbling in horror in an attempt to write something that might be more commercially successful than his literary novels. His 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw, became a masterpiece of gothic fiction and an archetypal haunted house story.
Indeed, James’s novella, about a young governess hired to look after two orphaned children in a remote English country house, is one of the most adapted works of horror fiction. The first film or television adaptation, and arguably the best, was Jack Clayton’s 1961 film The Innocents, starring Deborah Kerr and with a screenplay by Truman Capote, which perfectly captured the mystery and ambiguous horror of James’s text. Although no subsequent adaptation has yet approached The Innocents’s aesthetic summit, many, including The Nightcomers (1971), Presence of the Mind (1999), and The Others (2001), have been more or less successful. The main exception has been The Turning, released earlier this year, which represents the nadir of The Turn of the Screw adaptations.
Coming soon on the heels of The Turning and just in time for Halloween is the nine-part Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor. Created by Mike Flanagan, The Haunting of Bly Manor is not only an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw but a follow-up to Flanagan’s well-received 2018 series The Haunting of Hill House, a loose adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name. Like The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor is a loose adaptation of a great writer’s classic tale, though it also mixes in references to some of James’s other stories. The series begins in Northern California, where a small wedding is taking place at a large, castle-like mansion. After a pre-wedding dinner, the houseguests gather in the lush, fireplace-lit living room, where, to pass the quiet night, they decide to tell each other ghost stories. With this frame story, which preserves the frame-story introduction from James’s novella, the story of Bly Manor begins to unfold.
One of the women in the living room, a glass of wine in hand, begins to tell the story of Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti), a young American fourth grade teacher in 1980s London who responds to a newspaper advertisement from a well-to-do man seeking an au pair for his niece and nephew. It seems like an appealing proposition: an offer of full-time employment and free room and board at a nice estate in rural Essex. She wants to know what the catch is. Looking after two young children at a beautiful country home? For free? It sounds too good to be true.
The children’s uncle, Mr. Wingrave (Henry Thomas), explains to her that, if she must know, the children recently had an au pair who died at the house under mysterious circumstances, which has made it hard to find a replacement. “People are superstitious, I suppose,” Mr. Wingrave tells her. “Especially in the country.”
Dani, desperate to get out of her chaotic London classroom, decides to try her hand at looking after the two, superstitions be damned. Everything seems fine at first. The estate is resplendent. The children are adorable. The cook looks like Ray Romano. But this is a haunted house story, which means that things must begin to go wrong at some point. They do.
It may be odd to see the word “pleasant” attached to a horror series, but after the cinematic calamity of The Turning, it is, in fact, rather pleasant to see an adaptation that adheres more to the spirit, if not the letter, of The Turn of the Screw. Whereas The Turning set the story in the United States and made Miles and Flora older than they are in James’s novella, Bly Manor keeps the story in England, where it should be, and even more importantly keeps Flora and Miles as children. Bly Manor also maintains The Turn of the Screw’s continuous sensation of impending dread but is subtle about it, not falling into the trap of being too campy or too ghastly. And Bly Manor creatively fills in the backstories of many of the characters whose backgrounds are left mysterious in the novella, essentially manufacturing an entire mythology of Bly Manor.
Not all is right with Bly Manor, but most of its problems are structural. The frame-story introduction works well at the outset and in the conclusion, but the narrator continues to narrate even after we’ve abandoned the frame story for the main story, making for an intrusive presence. And the frequent cutting back and forth between the past and the present and between memory and reality can occasionally leave you confused. Bly Manor also has its fair share of standard horror movie tropes: ominous music, bizarre whooshing sounds, eerie faceless dolls, creaking floorboards, and various other things that go bump in the night. But these are to be expected. At least the cliche of creepy children with English accents is in its proper place. Somewhere in the ether, Henry James is sighing relievedly and thanking Netflix for at least getting that part right. And wherever you happen to be this fall, if you’re looking for something spooky to stream this Halloween, The Haunting of Bly Manor is not a bad choice.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
