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Culture Diary: The Haunting of Bly Manor
Scary stories are not my favorite. And yet, there’s something about them I love, especially scary stories that involve ghosts. They’re both the scariest and the most compelling to me because they are the most human.
Of course, most scary ghost stories (or at least the best ones) are usually a metaphor for all the ways the living are haunted — either by the dead or by past traumas or mistakes or lost loves. It’s a given — part of living is being revisited by our past, whether we invite it or not.
I watched The Haunting of Hill House and was completely taken by it. I was also completely terrified. I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night thinking of “Bent Neck Lady” and all she represents.
Like Hill House, which was based on a book by Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Bly Manor is an interpretation, of Henry James’ story “The Turn of the Screw.” Many of the same actors who were in Hill House reappear in Bly Manor. Both stories are centered around the universe of a large, foreboding mansion. But that’s where the similarities end.
For me, Bly Manor fell flat in the places that resonated in Hill House. For one, it wasn’t nearly as scary. Honestly, that was a bonus for me, since I’m not sure my fragile emotional state as of late could have handled another “Bent Neck Lady” situation. But also the scary parts didn’t make sense to me. While everything is (kind of) explained, the “rules” of this ghostly haunting just didn’t work. Why did some people living at Bly get spared the wrath of the “Lady in the Lake” while others met their demise with seemingly no provocation? How did the “tucking away” in memories process actually work? What was the point of Flora’s dolls?
But the real issue I had with this series was the way it hinged on love stories. Or what passes for love in these kinds of stories. One of the primary examples is the relationship of Miss Jessell, the children’s au pair prior to Dani, this series’ main character, to Peter Quint, the nefarious cad who works for Lord Wingrave. We learn in episode 1 that Miss Jessell met an untimely death while working at Bly, which has caused understandable trauma for Flora and Miles, Lord Wingrave’s niece and nephew, who’ve already been orphaned when their parents died during a trip to India two years before…
