 When The Haunting of Hill House arrived on Netflix in 2018, it seemed everyone was talking about it. An honestly creepy horror TV series, loosely based on the original novel, with plenty of reasons to re-watch. And because it was on Netflix, it wasn’t just the horror community getting hooked by the story. And two years later, we’re about to get a second series, based on another classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. With a mix of new cast and actors from the original series, Bly Manor, like Hill House, seems set to take core elements of the original story and do something completely new with them. Both books have had multiple adaptations filmed and put on screen, including the new The Turning, released earlier this year. But whereas film adaptions reflect the same storyline as the books, Netflix’s versions both give us new stories and new characters, while still retaining nods to the originals. I have no doubt Bly Manor will up the creep factor – the dolls in the trailer alone indicate as much. But these two books are a really interesting pairing, with a few similarities despite the different periods in which they were written and set. Hill House was released in 1959, The Turn of the Screw in 1898, just two years after the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Both, of course, are about haunted houses. They feel representative of their time periods and settings, with Hill House penned by Shirley Jackson, an American writer, and The Turn of the Screw written by Henry James, an American who later became British, and set his novella in England. And Screw has all the marks of a classic English ghost story, including the framing technique, where a narrator reveals he is telling the story on Christmas Eve, ghost stories at Christmas very much being a Victorian England tradition. They both use unreliable, female narrators, a governess sent to look after a pair of children at Bly Manor, a house lived in but haunted, whereas Nell in Hill House attends as part of an investigation into the abandoned home. As readers, we’re never quite sure if the ghosts are real. If they are, they target these two intruders, reinforcing the message they do not belong. Nell and the Governess are both young women, sheltered in their upbringing, with very romantic ideals. Both, it could be argued, also have mental health issues. Nell’s anxiety is threaded throughout, and if the ghosts aren’t real, these two women have created them, pushing them to the edge as they grapple with reality and fantasy, their experiences driving the stories towards their tragic endings. Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House takes the core of the story but transfers elements onto a new tale. Three of the siblings are named after the group who investigate Hill House in the original story, with a fourth named Shirley in reference to the author. Yet the activity still seems to swirl around Nell, who retains the no longer used (for which this writer is grateful) shortened version of Eleanor, despite the modern setting. The older two siblings – Steven and Shirley – remain steadfast in their belief that ghosts aren’t real, and what they witness at the house is a result of their mother’s declining mental health. Although on screen it’s harder to achieve the ambiguity the book uses, we still have that argument raging between the siblings, driving a wedge in their relationships. And elements of the book still make it across, such as the spiral staircase Book-Nell is so constantly drawn to. The characters are altered, modernised, giving new relationships and traits, but the central ideas remain. So far, we’ve only had a glimpse of the new Bly Manor series, but already there seems the same elements from the first series, and the same sort of loose adaptation from the book. The ghosts are subtle, there’s a larger cast of characters, but the idea of a governess going to look after two children seems to still be the main plot. It’ll be interesting to see if the religious elements remain. Hill House felt like a battle for the family’s souls, each side represented by the parents. In The Turn of the Screw, the governess is fighting for the souls of the children, against the dark shades of the houses’ previous inhabitants. The children in Hill House were innocent, ignorant, for the most part, of the darker side of the house. But Bly Manor already seems to be setting up a creepy child factor, pulling from the book, but like the ghosts, the nature of the children in the book is left up to the reader decide, and it would be great to have that ambiguity reflected in the series. It's no surprise to see these two paired up, books separated by six decades but with similar themes. Bly Manor and Hill House are very different types of homes, but the two work well together, and it’s easy to see why The Turn of the Screw was chosen to accompany Hill House. What they have done with this more ‘English’ story, how they’ve adapted it, and whether it lives up to the first season, remains to be seen.  BIO: Elle Turpitt is a writer and editor from South Wales, UK. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies and online, and details about these along with her book blog can be found at elleturpitt.com. She is Content Editor for Dead Head Reviews, and offers Fiction Editing for writers via elleturpittediting.com. When not reading, writing, editing or playing video games, she can usually be found on Twitter, @elleturpitt.   Comments are closed.
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