The Haunting Of Bly Manor

How iI got started on this Turn Of The Screw business is Netflix's series The Haunting Of Bly Manor, which is a modern interpretation of the story, with a few other Henry James stories thrown in. It is the follow-up to The Haunting Of Hill House, with the same creator, Mike Flanagan, and some of the same cast, but has nothing to do with the first series.

The series is laid out as a story being told by a woman (Carla Gugino) at a party the night before a wedding. The beginning is much like The Turn Of The Screw, as a young woman (Victoria Pedretti) is hired by a man (Henry Thomas) to be an au pair for his niece and nephew, who have been orphaned and live in a country house called Bly Manor.

The difference is it is 1987, and the young woman is American. The boy, Miles, has been expelled from school. The girl, Flora, has an unusual attachment to the dolls in her dollhouse. There is a housekeeper, a cook, and a gardener (Amelia Eve). Pedretti starts seeing a strange man around the grounds, and is told it might be Peter Quint, the childrens' father's valet, who disappeared after absconding with funds. As in the book, he had a relationship with Pedretti's predecessor, Miss Jessel, who drowned herself in the pond.

What this series does is greatly expand the story, so that all the characters get their own story. For example, Thomas, whose character only appears at the opening of the book, is given a backstory--he had an affair with his sister-in-law, and Flora is his daughter. He also is visited by an alter-ego, This is partly based on a James story called "The Jolly Corner." Pedretti brings her own ghost with her, an ex-fiance who got run over by a truck.

For the most part I enjoyed this series, but like The Haunting Of Hill House, is takes a literary work that suggests ghosts and goes crazy with them.  By the end of this series there are too many ghosts to count, and they are definitely real. The penultimate episode, based on a James story called "The Romance Of Old Clothes," gives the background of Bly Major, stretching back hundreds of years. I don't want to give too much away but there is a "lady of the lake." This brings up questions about the physiology of ghosts, because this ghost can definitely touch physically.

The second half of the series gets quite convoluted. It does have a sweet love story, as Pedretti and Eve fall in love and open a flower shop in Vermont. But the dead don't stay dead.