The Genius of Hill House and Bly Manor

Warning: The following article contains minor spoilers for The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Last year, when The Haunting of Hill House aired, my best friend and I began a tradition that has surprisingly held up in the 2020 hellscape. Thanks to the release of The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve managed to binge the entire series of each new season (obviously only two) of Mike Flanagan’s ghost story anthology. However, I’ve been seeing people suggesting that Bly Manor is boring or somehow less scary than The Haunting of Hill House.

To that I say, you clearly are missing the point. Bly Manor is a different sort of ghost story than Hill House was. The Haunting of Hill House told the story of a family. Specifically, it told a story involving a family breaking a cycle of trauma, pain, and fear. Yes, the story had ghosts, and each member of the Crain family had a sort of supernatural affinity within that ghost story, but it was so much more than that.

In the end, it was about how the love of their sister managed to save the entire family from ruin. Not every member of the family made it out, of course, Nell, their mother, and their father perished by the end. However, it was Nell who was able to pull the family together and help the surviving siblings overcome traumas that they couldn’t seem to shake. Her love, and their love for her, was the catalyst for their healing. No one exemplifies this more than Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s Luke Crain, who goes from a heroin addict to a recovering, functional member of society over the course of the series.

His road was not simple. He had a long way to go and Nell’s faith in him was only a small part of that. The Haunting of Hill House was so much more than a ghost story. It was a tale of each member of the Crain family overcoming their individual traumas and struggles.

In turn, The Haunting of Bly Manor is also much more than it seems on the surface. If you can separate it from The Haunting of Hill House, going in with an open mind and not expecting constant terror, you’ll find an altogether different experience. That is by design. Though Hill House was based on Shirley Jackson’s novel, and Bly Manor is based in part on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, both series took major liberties from their source material.

Bly Manor tells a story of love, loss, and even the loss of self. I have written before about how the loss of identity trope can be horrifying in itself and this is true here. I won’t go into too many details for those who haven’t finished Bly Manor yet, but if you break things down from both series, one thing is common: love.

Bly Manor’s horror is a slow, creeping sense of dread. It is a tension that lays over everything like a filter. Every walk down a dark hall, every image in a window, and every background ghost ratchets up the tension that you don’t notice until you really start to pay attention. Unlike Hill House, the scares aren’t frequent, and they aren’t in your face. It is a more grounded, focused type of horror.

Considering I am being spoiler-free about Bly Manor, I won’t go into detail about Ms. Grose’s ultimate fate. However, I do find it worrisome when you consider the fate of many other women of color in horror. I could say the same thing about the central romance of the series, which happens to be between two women, and ultimately ends tragically.

However, it is hard for me to be too harsh on Bly Manor in regards to the ending of the main couple because all of the couples in Bly Manor ultimately meet a sad end. At least it is equal opportunity and doesn’t single out queer people over non-queer ones. That doesn’t even go into detail about how respectful, tasteful, and beautiful the arc of Bly Manor’s central queer relationship is portrayed.

In fact, to dip into slight spoiler territory here, I found that the romance between Victoria Pedretti’s Dani and Amelia Eve’s Jamie was surprisingly natural feeling. It wasn’t shoved in for no reason. It felt honest and pulled another facet of love into Bly Manor’s narrative. Where Hill House’s familial love took center stage, Bly Manor puts different types of love at its center.

Their relationship isn’t the only one either. You have the light, easy, yet tragic relationship between Rahul Kohli’s Owen and T’Nia Miller’s Hannah Grose on the lighter end. On the darker end, you have the more intense, dangerous sort of love that Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s Peter Quint feels for Tahirah Sharif’s Rebecca Jessel. Somehow, the romance between Dani and Jamie feels like a happy medium.

Going any further down that train of thought is a spoiler minefield, so rather than going further I’ll just say that if you give The Haunting of Bly Manor an open-minded watch, you’ll find that thematically the theme of love carries on from its predecessor. Mike Flanagan has somehow managed to craft another tale that has woven grounded, powerful meaning into terrifying concepts of possession.

There is also a resonating factor in this story for people who have been affected by seeing a loved one suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease. I found that the loss of identity concept was both overt and also subtly symbolic in various parts of the tale. Even down to the nature of Bly Manor’s ghosts themselves, there are many relatable themes here.

I think people who loved Hill House for its nail-biting terror were expecting Bly Manor to be the same type of thrill ride and in truth, they would have been disappointed regardless. Bly Manor is a relentless, tension-building experience that doesn’t try to terrify you in conventional ways. It builds up the fear of the unknown, the growing sense of dread. Even in its final episode, it takes a turn that is surprisingly profound if you look at it via the lens of losing yourself and not being able to hold onto the parts of you that make you an individual.

The Haunting of Bly Manor is a story of love, wrapped up in a ghost story skin. It isn’t some bawdy bodice-ripping romance novel, nor is it a simple Gothic romance in the vein of Wuthering Heights. It is a story about love and the dangers of heartbreak, betrayal, and losing your sense of self. That is where Bly Manor’s true genius lies and it is neither better nor worse than The Haunting of Hill House. However, it is indeed (in Flora’s words) perfectly splendid.