The Haunting of Hill House was a word-of-mouth hit for Netflix. Horror maestro Stephen King called it a “close to a work of genius, really. I think Shirley Jackson would approve, but who knows for sure” (we’ll have to ask Elisabeth Moss), while I’m still shaking from the reveal in episode [REDACTED]. If you know, you know. Creator Mike Flanagan likely could have wrung another season out of the Crain family, but instead, he’s going the anthology series route — The Haunting of Hill House is now The Haunting of Bly Manor.
Based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, the 1980s-set Haunting “revolves around Bly Manor and the lives of its inhabitants, both living and dead,” according to Netflix. Much of the cast from Hill House is back — including Victoria Pedretti (Nell), Henry Thomas (Hugh), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Luke), Kate Siegel (Theo), and Catherine Parker (Poppy) — but they’re playing different characters this time; the plots between the series are disconnected, too, with Flanagan telling EW, “I felt like the Crains have been through enough, and we left them exactly as we all wanted to remember them.”
“I have a story,” an unseen narrator says in the teaser trailer above. “A ghost story.” Spooky. The Haunting of Bly Manor premieres in October. Also spooky.
