Mike Flanagan, the creator of The Haunting of Bly Manor, has explained why the isn’t a direct adaptation of the source material.
The Haunting of Bly Manor – the follow up to Netflix’s successful horror series The Haunting of Hill House – is coming our way this October and fans are hoping for another scare-fest.
The series is inspired by the classic Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw but it won’t be a like for like adaptation. Why is this the case? Well, the show’s creator Mike Flanagan has explained during a panel for the Fantasia International Film Festival:
“It’s not about doing a straight adaptation anymore – that’s already been done. We’d cover two episodes, and then we’d have eight episodes of filler. I need to make a 10-hour version of this.”
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The book has been adapted multiple times before so it makes sense for Flanagan wanting to take a different approach. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of nods towards the source material and the wider works of Henry James:
“When the show launches, you’ll see each episode is actually the title of one of his stories. They’re all braided together and made to work in one (hopefully) cohesive story.”
One of the big changes that had to be made, however, was the use of language in James’ book: “His language is not something that’s as easy to relate to for a contemporary reader or viewer. And certainly not easy to adapt.”
Flanagan then went on to praise James and how ahead of his time he was: “There’s a story Henry James wrote called ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,’ which is a phenomenal short ghost story, and if you strip away all of the proper language and all of the context of the time, underneath it, you see the DNA of The Ring, The Grudge.”
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Hopefully, The Haunting of Bly Manor will be worthy of its source material despite the changes and be a terrifying follow up to its successor series. We will find out next month!
Based on the illustrious works of Henry James, The Haunting of Bly Manor is an all-new chapter in The Haunting… anthology series.
The Haunting of Bly Manor features a cast that includes Hill House returnees Kate Siegel, Catherine Parker, Henry Thomas, Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Victoria Pedretti along with T’Nia Miller (Years and Years), Amelia Eve (Big Boys Don’t Cry), Amelie Smith (EastEnders), Benjamin Ainsworth (Flora and Ulysses) and Rahul Kohli (iZombie).
The Haunting of Bly Manor is set to premiere on Netflix on October 9th.
