Netflix's 'The Haunting of Bly Manor' Was Inspired by This Truly Creepy Ghost Story
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Spoilers follow for The Haunting of Bly Manor and a 120-year old book.
Netflix's nine-episode miniseries The Haunting of Bly Manor has been the must-see TV show of spooky season this year. Following on from 2018's The Haunting of Hill House, Bly Manor featured much of the same creative talent, including showrunner Mike Flanagan and lead actress Victoria Pedretti, but it told a standalone ghost story.
What inspired The Haunting of Bly Manor?
The first season in the anthology series, The Haunting of Hill House, was famously adapted from the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, albeit with several creative liberties; in the book, the unrelated characters assemble at Hill House to study paranormal phenomena, while in the show, they are a family that moved into the house to "flip" it.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is also based on a well-known work of Gothic fiction, although it's a little harder to find in bookstores as Flanagan and co. changed the title in order to fit the show into the ongoing "Haunting" brand. Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw was the inspiration behind Bly Manor, and anybody familiar with the text will be able to instantly recognize several of the original's foundational elements: a remote mansion, a troubled young nanny, and two very creepy children.
The show largely hews more closely to the basic plot of the source material this time around, although it does transpose the story from Victorian times to the 1980s. This means that one of the book's central themes—the repressed sexuality of the governess—is able to be explored in more overt ways, i.e. through au pair Dani's budding relationship with gardener Jamie.
Adapting a relatively short novella into a nine-hour TV show also means that the characters of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, who never appear in person in the novel, can be more fully-fleshed out, and the "strange" behavior of the housekeeper, Mrs Grose, is given a thoroughly mind-blowing explanation. Oh, and the ending is a little happier. Sort of.
You might be thinking, however, that the Lady of the Lake never appears in The Turn of the Screw. And those episode titles didn't always seem to directly fit the events of the show, did they? That's because Flanagan also drew on several other ghost stories penned by Henry James to help build out the world and mythology of Bly Manor, and the entire season is peppered with references to the author's works.
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