We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of Mike Flanagan’s second foray into television, The Haunting of Bly Manor, an updated adaptation of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” It was the mass misunderstanding of gothic horror post Bly Manor’s debut that caused me to really start writing about my love of gothic horror and it set me on the path to educating those on what gothic is, isn’t, and everything in between. It can be lonely because appreciation for the gothic can seem nil these days where people will launch into a bad-faith argument with you over how most films are not horror because they didn’t find it scary or it wasn’t an out and out slasher gore fest. No offense to slashers, I love them, but too many of these great debaters use them as some sort of cudgel to measure all horror against. As if all horror isn’t—to a degree—spawned from gothic horror, but I digress. I often argue that there is a place for the likes of Shirley Jackson and Henry James in horror, as well as Freddy, Jason, and Michael.
Luckily for us, Flanagan can deftly navigate many horror subgenres and we get gems like The Haunting of Hill House and Hush. Cue Hannah Montana; we have the best of both worlds. However, for some reason, everyone and their sister-in-law had a bizarre out of pocket armchair PhD in the gothic style opinion about The Haunting of Bly Manor. Every time I logged onto Facebook, someone I knew from high school or college and doubly knew that they had not paid attention in English classes was denigrating The Haunting of Bly Manor for fitting the gothic horror archetype. I saw it all: too slow, not scary, too many ghosts, not enough ghosts, too much romance, not enough bloodshed, too many small creepy children, no happy ending, and so on. While it’s one thing to simply not like gothic horror, it’s another to misunderstand it and then hold genre conventions against the piece like it’s some sort of damning evidence of how poorly executed it is. Expecting gothic horror to not be gothic horror because you do not like or understand it is a logical fallacy wrapped up in a conundrum.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is more of a throwback to older gothic storytelling traditions. The Haunting of Hill House had mined off of more contemporary gothic trappings, and perhaps the shift from that confused people as well. Regardless, both are valid and heartrending reimaginings of tried and true gothic fiction. However, I would say that viewers need to be a little more acquainted with the genre and even “The Turn of the Screw” for Bly Manor to be fully effective. The show follows the familiar Henry James plot of an American nanny tasked with taking care of two children in a sprawling and possibly haunted British manor. However, the show goes beyond the story and develops the characters to a rich and satisfying degree. Everyone, no matter how doomed they are, is given a chance to tell their story in full.
Bly Manor’s melancholy is pervasive, and that is what makes it all endearingly special. It poses difficult questions like its Hill House predecessor. The depth of love and devotion are mined to a painful degree and the overarching question that the audience returns to is: Is loving a person worth the eventual loss? We will all die. We will all lose loved ones. That, my dear friends and readers, is a terror that goes deeper than a jump scare. We’re all ephemeral. We’re fleeting. We are confetti. Bly Manor is happy to answer the question it poses and reminds us that, while we are all going to lose one another, the time we spend together matters more. Life is temporary, love is endless, and all love stories are essentially ghost stories.
Love is portrayed with devastating earnestness, especially the romance between Dani (Victoria Pedretti) and Jamie (Amelia Eve). All relationships will be touched by death, and many times, it’s a reality that is only explored in heterosexual spaces. Bly Manor offers an LGBTQ+ spin on the gothic and what love beyond the grave actually means. Dani’s eventual demise could have been crass and cheap because a lot of modern television writers love to play into the harmful trope of “bury your gays,” where LGBTQ+ characters are killed for shock value. Dani is able to make the best of her situation post-merging with Viola Lloyd’s ghost as Bly Manor. She and Jamie make plans, focus on themselves, and grow a life together never knowing when Viola will come to claim Dani. It’s painfully romantic to see Jamie choose Dani despite the inevitable heartache. Dani is respected as a full person and is still worthy of love even though her days are numbered. In many ways, Dani and Jamie’s love becomes an allegory for loving people with chronic or terminal illness. You love the person despite what may come because, again, loving that person is worth the pain of losing them. In Jamie’s eyes, Dani is everything.
The types of love that are explored in Bly Manor make the show all the more interesting. We witness a full gamut of relationship dynamics including platonic, familial, parental, romantic, obsessive, and so on. Love is not wholly one thing, and using a genre that often mines the depths of romantic love to put all sorts of relationships under a carefully nuanced microscope is truly a brilliant move. In addition to seeing the characters interact with one another, we are allowed to know them as individuals and spend time with them outside of their bonds to one another. It’s episodes like “The Altar of the Dead” that create heartrending portraits of characters and lay bare the sheer talent of the writers and the actors. I dare anyone to say T’Nia Miller’s Hannah Grose isn’t one of the most comprehensive and emotional portrayals committed to television in the past five years. These laudable and delicately created characters help involve a modern audience in a subgenre that is built keenly on terror and emotion.
Bly Manor is made more interesting and compelling by the fact that the villains are painted in an empathetic light so the audience can understand them without glorifying them. Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Viola Lloyd (Kate Siegel) are both villains; that is not up for debate. They have done reprehensible and horrific acts, but they are both victims as well because like in life villainy is never a clear cut sort of path. Peter is the victim of his parents, a child sexual assault survivor from a lower class family. His jadedness and his warped view of love, obsession, and possession are the perfect mix to make this hurt man the sort of person who hurts others. Viola is a victim of her own sister’s jealousy. In life, Viola had been vivacious and dynamic. After being murdered by her sister, she became a shell of herself, a monstrous vacuum of unrealized emotions and dreams. Peter and Viola are creatures of want, needing to fill gaping voids of pain and dismay. Those desires have body counts. In the end, the characters who could have been portrayed as straight monstrous are as human as the protagonists. No character is undercooked here at Bly Manor. (I like to think Owen would be proud of this line.)
No, The Haunting of Bly Manor won’t be for everyone. I don’t think everything out there has to be for everyone. Even if it’s not your cup of poorly American-brewed tea, it is someone’s. You can’t fault gothic horror media for being gothic horror media. Take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. All in all, Bly Manor still deserves love and respect and holds a tender place in the hearts of many viewers. The modern gothic is always a miracle and, to this connoisseur of the subgenre, Bly Manor is nothing short of a phenomenal feat. Polarizing as gothic horror can be in an era where it has fallen out of fashion, we are blessed to have creatives like Mike Flanagan, who don’t care so much about trends but instead care about stories, preservation, and horror.
Tags: Alex Essoe, Amelia Eve, Amelie Bea Smith, Axelle Carolyn, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Ciarán Foy, E.L. Katz, Gothic Horror, Greg Sestero, Henry James, Henry Thomas, Horror, Jim Piddock, Kate Siegel, Netflix, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Rahul Kohli, T'Nia Miller, Tahirah Sharif, The Newton Brothers, TV, Unearthing the Gothic, Victoria Pedretti
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