I really enjoyed director Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House mini-series (buy it HERE) that was released on the Netflix streaming service a couple years ago, so I'm looking forward to the new season that will turn this Haunting into an anthology series. It's called The Haunting of Bly Manor, and today a poster has arrived online, while Vanity Fair has gotten their hands on a batch of first look images.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is based on the 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and will also work in elements from, according to Flanagan, "a dozen" other James ghost stories, including The Jolly Corner, about a menacing doppelgänger, and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, about two sisters and a mysterious chest of beloved dresses. Flanagan's producing partner Trevor Macy calls it a "literary remix".
The show is set primarily in 1987 and will follow
a young woman who moves to the English countryside to care for two orphaned children, encountering evidence of a grim history and entities she can’t begin to explain. While Hill House was the story of family struggle and trauma, Bly Manor is about broken hearts that never heal and tragic star-crossed romance.
The cast of The Haunting of Bly Manor includes Victoria Pedretti, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Amelie Bea Smith, T'Nia Miller, Henry Thomas, Kate Siegel, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Tahirah Sharif, Amelia Eve, and Rahul Kohli.
While Flanagan directed every episode of the Hill House season, he had some back-up on Bly Manor. This season has episodes directed by Ciarán Foy, Liam Gavin, Axelle Carolyn, and the duo of Yolande Ramke and Ben Howling.
The poster and most of the Vanity Fair images can be seen below. To see one more image, and to learn a bit about the show's characters, click over to Vanity Fair.
The Haunting of Bly Manor reaches Netflix sometime this fall.