Victoria Pedretti stars as a governess to two orphans on a spooky estate in The Haunting of Bly Manor.
The Halloween season is almost upon us, so brace yourselves for the annual onslaught of horror fare. But we're also getting a good old-fashioned spooky ghost story with the Netflix series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, loosely based on The Turn of the Screw while incorporating several other ghost stories by Henry James. The series is showrunner Mike Flanagan's highly anticipated follow-up to 2018's exquisitely brooding The Haunting of Hill House. The first teaser dropped earlier this month, and now the streaming platform has released the full trailer.
(Spoilers for the Henry James novel below.)
The Haunting of Hill House shared the top spot in Ars' 2018 list of our favorite TV shows with BBC's Killing Eve. We loved Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy's inventive reimagining of Shirley Jackson's classic novel, at once a Gothic ghost story and a profound examination of family dysfunction. It stayed true to the tone and spirit of the original, aided by dialogue, narration, and other small details from the source material. Small wonder that it garnered award nominations from the Motion Picture Sound Editors, Writers Guild of America, and Art Directors Guild.
Rumors of a possible second season began swirling soon after the series started streaming, and they were confirmed in February of last year. Flanagan's plan was to turn the series into a horror anthology, with a whole new ghost story and fresh characters. He opined in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that the Crain family featured in Hill Househad suffered enough, and as far as he was concerned, its story had been told. But several cast members will return in Bly Manor, albeit playing different characters: Victoria Pedretti, Henry Thomas, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Catherine "Katie" Parker, and Kate Siegel.
