🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is the latest "literary remix" (as producer Trevor Macy called it in a Vanity Fair interview) of a classic ghost story for Netflix. While its predecessor The Haunting of Hill House is based on the Shirley Jackson novel of the same name from the 1960s, Bly Manor takes its main story from the Henry James 1898 story The Turn of the Screw.
Bly Manor, however, is not the first time the story of a governess, two children and the haunted house they live in has been brought to screen. Out of the numerous versions of the story, however, the best in 1961's The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton.
And if the surname Clayton sounds familiar, that is because Bly Manor creator Mike Flanagan called Victoria Pedretti's character Dani Clayton in tribute to the director.
In fact, this is not the only way the Netflix show pays tribute to the horror movie, which is often voted one of the best horror movies ever made.
In a press call, Flanagan said of the movie: "I adore Jack Clayton's The Innocents. I love it...it's eerie on an incredible level.
"On our first day of the writers' room, we went over to Amblin and we watched The Innocents in Spielberg's theater there...It's a really wonderful way to put up a really beautifully realized adaptation of the same source material."
He added: "That was a movie I really wanted to celebrate because it's a movie that I think isn't talked about enough for whatever reason. It doesn't come up as often as The Haunting does, though it employs a lot of the same technique and came out two years prior. It's one of those films that cinephiles love and horror fans love, but a lot of people don't know it."
Starring Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave and Peter Wyngarde, The Innocents is a more faithful adaptation of The Turning of the Screw, in which a governess (names Miss Giddens in The Innocents, unnamed in the book) comes to Bly Manor and starts to see ghosts that they think may have nefarious aims towards the two children under her care.
There are a number of major differences between the film and The Haunting of Bly Manor. The film, for example, keeps the book's Victoria setting, and also keeps the original ending of the novella.
Surprisingly for a film made 60 years ago, The Innocents is actually franker about the dark sexuality of the original book. The child Miles (played by Martin Stephens) is disturbingly flirtatious with Miss Giddens after being possessed by Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde), and the subtext of the movie is even more disturbing, implying that it does that the two dead adult lovers Quint and Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop) are possessing the children to continue their relationship.
However, in a world where Cuties brought Netflix worldwide controversy, it is probably a good thing for the show that The Haunting of Bly Manor avoided this subtext.
In fact, the Netflix show sublimates the troubled sexuality of the story into a new form. Where the original story and movie has an uneasy psychosexuality between Miss Giddens and the possessed Miles, the series has an actual romance at its heart between Dani and the gardener Jamie (Amelia Eve), a new character for Bly Manor.
The Haunting of Bly Manor also takes a different twist on the world. The Innocents always keeps the idea of whether the ghosts are real or only in the governess's head ambiguous, whereas ghosts are very real in Bly Manor. The Netflix series also makes a major change by making the housekeeper Hannah Grose (T'Nia Miller) a ghost herself, one of many ghosts trapped in the manor compared to the two in The Innocents.
However, Bly Manor does take a number of plot points that exist in The Innocents and not in The Turn of the Screw. The music box that Dani finds, for example, is straight out of the 1961 movie, and the tune it plays is "O Willow Waly," the song that plays before the opening titles of the film.The moment where Dani first sees Miss Jessel (Tahirah Sharif) in a gothic folly by the lake is also straight from the movie—in the book, she first sees her on a bench.
For Bly Manor fans who want to watch The Innocents after finishing the Netflix series, it is currently not available on any streaming service. However, there are a number of free versions available to watch on YouTube.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is streaming now on Netflix.
