An English Haunting

[Melanie Wendelberger]

Ayoung American woman fleeing her tragic past finds herself caring for two orphaned children on an English estate that she suspects might be haunted in the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor. Showrunner Mike Flanagan's highly anticipated followup to 2018's exquisitely brooding The Haunting of Hill House, this season is loosely based on the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw.

Granted, Bly Manor never quite reaches the same level as Hill House, but it's nonetheless a "perfectly splendid" ghost story that doubles as a quiet, thoughtful reflection on love and loss, in keeping with the oblique, cerebral writing style of James. Between Doctor Sleep, Hill House, and Bly Manor, Flanagan has pretty much established himself as the reigning master of reinventing classic horror stories for a modern audience.

As I wrote previously, The Turn of the Screw, published serially in Collier's Weekly in 1898, tells the story of a governess, hired by the absent uncle of two orphaned children, to look after them at his Essex country house, Bly. Soon after arriving, the governess sees figures of a man and woman she suspects may be spirits. She learns from the grim housekeeper that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, had an affair with another servant, Peter Quint, and both died. They also seemed to have had an unhealthy attachment to the children, Flora and Miles, and the governess suspects the children can see the ghosts, too. The governess succeeds in saving Flora, but saving poor Miles costs the boy his life, since he dies from the shock of Quint's spirit departing his body.

But Flanagan didn't limit himself to that source material for Bly Manor; he also cleverly incorporated other elements from James' collection of ghost stories. "The Turn of the Screw has been adapted so many times," he has said of his reasoning. "We know how perfectly it fits into a feature film format. We're doing a whole season of television. The Turn of the Screw is only one of a dozen stories that we're telling. All Henry James, all thematically linked. It's been really exciting to have this much bigger canvas, because you're not going to do better than The Innocents anyway."

Flanagan's version preserves James' narrative framing device of guests at an inn listening to a ghost story. But he updates it to a 2007 wedding held in Northern California, with an unnamed female guest (Carla Gugino, who played the Crain matriarch in Hill House) serving as narrator. He also keeps much of the central plot from Turn of the Screw, at least in the beginning. (The story diverges quite a bit by season's end.) Danielle "Dani" Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) applies for the job of live-in governess to two orphans, the niece and nephew of Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas). He is initially reluctant to hire her, but she persuades him otherwise and soon finds herself at Bly Manor, the Wingrave family's sprawling estate in the English countryside.

Her young charges are Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Flora (Amelie Smith). The house is run like clockwork by Hannah Grose (T'Nia Miller), with the help of the cook, Owen (Rahul Kohli), and a groundskeeper, Jamie (Amelia Eve). But Dani soon notices the occasional strange behavior of the children and spots a mysterious man lurking at the windows. The man matches the description of Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), Henry Wingrave's former valet, who mysteriously vanished after embezzling from his employer. Quint had romanced the former governess, Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), who purportedly drowned herself in the lake (really more of a large pond) on the estate. Dani gradually begins to realize that there is something seriously wrong at Bly Manor.

I have this feeling like I'm walking through the dense, overgrown jungle and I can't really see anything except the path in front of me. But I know there's this thing hidden. This angry, empty, lonely beast. It's watching me. Matching my movements. Just out of sight. But I can feel it. I know it's there. And it's waiting.

There are a lot of narrative threads to juggle here, and Flanagan somehow does manage to pull them all together in the end, which is quite a feat given the diversity of his source material. But drawing from so many different Jamesian stories might be why Bly Manor doesn't quite achieve the same power and cohesiveness as Hill House, although the writing and performances are still excellent. Miller in particular gives a heartbreaking portrayal of Hannah Grose, whose painful self-revelation anchors the fifth episode ("The Altar of the Dead"). Yet it still can't match the jaw-dropping fifth episode of Hill House ("The Bent-Neck Lady"), which emotionally shattered many a viewer, myself included.

For all the tragedies, psychological trauma, and ghostly hauntings, there's still a bit of playfulness to the making of this anthology series. Part of the marketing campaign for Bly Manor included posting a tongue-in-cheek "official" Zillow listing for the estate, chock-full of sly references for those who have seen the show. (The house is off-market, of course, although the description claims it's been listed for "eternity.") Of particular ominous note: the master wing is "off limits," and the house contains plentiful "markings of its previous residents [that] can be found all over the estate." In other words, the place has ghosts.

With Hill House, there wasn't any question that the haunting was real. But literary scholars and critics have been debating The Turn of the Screw ever since it was first published, because James was deliberately ambiguous as to whether the governess is seeing actual ghosts or simply going mad and imagining them.

The initial screenwriter for The Innocents, William Archibald, assumed the ghosts were real; Director Jack Clayton preferred to be true to James' original ambiguity, and the final script ended up somewhere in between, with some pretty strong Freudian overtones. For The Turning, Director Floria Sigismondi went with the "insane governess" hypothesis and enhanced the Freudian overtones significantly. (Fortunately, the character of Miles, played by Finn Wolfhard, is a teenager, not a child, in The Turning, otherwise it would have been even more disturbing.)

Ultimately, it doesn't matter. For the narrator, the story is "true" in a less literal sense, in that it captures essential truths about loving and losing someone dear, as well as how to process grief and find a way to keep their memories alive. As she tells Flora when the bride confesses to being afraid of dying before her new husband, all ghost stories, in the end, are love stories. The narrator tells Flora that, if tragedy strikes, she will eventually find little pieces of her life that remind her of her lost love, "and you'll hold them tight. It'll be like he's here with you. Even though he's gone."

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What was the Enfield case? In August 1977 a single mother called Peggy Hodgson called the Emergency Services to report loud knockings and furniture moving by itself. The police officers who attended the scene witnessed some phenomena and the Daily Mirror sent a reporter to cover the story. The Society for Psychical sent members Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair to investigate. They found the activities, such as they were, focused on the two young girls living there with their two younger brothers who rarely figure in any of the accounts.

Grosse and Playfair moved into the Enfield House in September 1977, which also happens to be the year and month that the book about the Amityville haunting was published in the UK. They had an uphill battle in some ways: the SPR was institutionally cautious when it came to poltergeists. Were they for example living or were they dead? SPR legend Frank Podmore (1856-1910) considering them simply the product of misbehaving children.

ROGER CLARKE is best known as a film-writer for the Independent newspaper and more recently Sight & Sound. Inspired by a childhood spent in two haunted houses, Roger Clarke has spent much of his life trying to see a ghost. He was the youngest person ever to join the Society for Psychical Research in the 1980s and was getting his ghost stories published by The Pan & Fontana series of horror books at just 15, when Roald Dahl asked his agent to take him on as a client. His latest book is Ghosts A Natural History: 500 Years of Searching for Proof

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