Mike Flanagan’s highly successful Haunting of Hill House formula will be applied to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
First series was excellent. Glad Netflix has signed Flannegan up for a multi year deal.
Starts out this Friday. I saw it was based on the Turn of the Screw and may incorporate other Henry James horror elements. Flannagan seemed very enamored with James and you may see a lot more of his interpretations as time goes on.
— Alan
Yup. This is Mike Flanagan.
Enjoyed the first episode, though I spent way too much time looking at all the shadowy shapes in the background (damn you Hill House). I have no idea how many creepy figures are actually there, and how much it’s my imagination.
Seems like this might be a slower burn than Hill House, in a good way.
Purrrfectly splendid!
In all seriousness, the last episode is kind of lame. The longest epilogue ever. I felt like the series could’ve ended about ten minutes into the last episode and it would’ve been great.
I really enjoyed Hill House and so I was pretty hyped for this one but I bailed after three episodes. Oh God, the British accents are truly awful. It was like listening to nails on a chalkboard. Every time someone said “perfectly splendid” I wished them a horrendous death. Plus the whole thing was so slow and drawn out and even just thinking about it puts me to ZZZzzzzz. 3/10 for the nice scenery and for the chef, who seemed like a nice guy.
I’m not quite at the end yet, but I saw this and felt compelled to point out that most of the English characters are played by English actors. But maybe your complaint isn’t about the accents sounding fake?
I kind of feel the same way about it not really measuring up to Hill House, though. Not as scary or gripping by far.
My complaint is about the accents sounding very fake. Although I suspect it is about class (trying to sound upper class) rather than geography. Either way it was really grating.
It looks like The Guardian reviewer picked up on it too.
“The only terrifying things are the accents and the language.”
“are we supposed to know whether the children, who say things like “perfectly splendid” and “I sometimes forget myself” are meant to be creepy, possessed or just posh as written by someone with an unEnglish tin ear?”
Ah, that makes sense to me, now. I didn’t consciously pick up on it and was obviously not bothered by it before, but now that you’ve pointed it out I’m hearing it too.
This version of the story is really good, for those that appreciate B&W classics. Check out who plays Flora.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check that out. Bly Manor is a dud, unfortunately.
I may be in the minority, but I really liked this one. In some way, better than Hill House. Hill House felt a few episodes too long, and a few unneeded jump scares.
The ending to this one really got me in the feels though.
I enjoyed it. I thought the last two episodes could each have been cut and fit into a single episode. The origin story in the penultimate episode really dragged and then the epilogue story also felt longer than needed.
There were some gaps in explanation, however. How did the storyteller find out all the details she knew?
All in all an interesting ghost story. I never saw the first series so I have nothing to compare it to.
Man you weren’t kidding when you said the the last two episodes dragged, because somewhere along the line you must have tuned out. The narrator is the gardner and the girl being married is purrrrfectly splendid just to point out some of the connections.
We really liked the show as well. It did kind of drag in places and could have had more editing but I thought it earned it’s ending. I did like how it got more terrifying the more they explained things.
One thing I am not sure about:
Did no one get whacked when the parents lived there?
How they had to do the double-fake with the wedding at the bookends threw me also. They couldn’t use the same actors or they’d give the plot twist away. But Omar and Jamie’s older actors were a tough sell.
Correct, I think. I guess we’re supposed to believe that no one had wandered into Viola’s path for a long time, until relatively recently.
Despite my negative comment earlier, I do like a lot of things about Bly Manor, but the story slowed down too often and had too many gaps, and there wasn’t nearly enough tension, suspense and scary stuff. And the character development and final reveal were less interesting and surprising than they were in Hill House. My biggest complaint, though, was that they stuffed far too much into the last couple of episodes and relied far too much on cheap exposition.
I know who the narrator was. But how did the narrator know the origin story? (Remember the widowed husband and daughter throwing the chest into the lake? How the heck did the gardener know that?) How did the narrator know abour the uncle’s personal issues? There seem to be a lot of reveals by the narrator that the narrator shouldn’t have known from her own personal experience.
Two possible reasons;
- Viola, via Dani, told her.
- the creators just decided from a story angle to handwave it. I’m ok with that if that’s what they did.