How is The Haunting of Bly Manor connected to Hill House?
Netflix entertained and petrified us all with their horror series The Haunting of Hill House back in 2018, and now they're bringing out a sequel called The Haunting of Bly Manor, which is set to be even more terrifying than the first. But are the two stories - Bly Manor and Hill House - connected?
The second series is inspired by the ghost stories of Henry James, including the 1898 horror novella The Turn of the Screw, and it follows the story of a tutor who is looking after two children, Flora and Miles, at stately mansion Bly Manor. Before long, she starts to see strangers around the property and the grounds, and that's where things all start to unravel.
Show creator Mike Flanagan has already said that the second series will be very different to the first, explaining, "... it was really important for all of us not to play the same notes we played for the first season. The first season is very much entrenched in family dynamics and death and grief and loss and child trauma. We all collectively felt like we’d said everything we wanted to say about that."
So what connects the two? According to Flanagan, although the series stand very much on their own with each telling its own story, stylistically both Hill House and Bly Manor are being set up as a cohesive series. Plus, many stars from the first series are returning for the second as different characters, including Victoria Pedretti, Henry Thomas and Oliver Jackson-Cohen.
"At its foundation, the Haunting series is very much about haunted spaces and haunted people," Flanagan explained. "The way we make those things dance together is really going to be what’s uniform about Hill House and Bly."
On the whole, the setting and plot of each is quite separate, with new characters and new inspiration; Hill House is based on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, while Bly Manor is based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw).
The good news is that you don't need to put in any groundwork before watching The Haunting of Bly Manor, although you might fancy re-watching the first series because you actively want nightmares. Each to their own.
The Haunting of Bly Manor lands on Netflix on October 9th.
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