The Haunting of Bly Manor - Netflix's next Hill House

Interesting. I could see the gardener being told the story through via Dani. It would have been easy enough to show that briefly but I suspect your second reason is the real one.

Watched it today. Way too long and melodramatic for its own good, but it had some good points. I liked the indian english actor, considering checking out iZombie since he is in that too.

He doesn’t seem to have a lot of range, but Raul Kohli is consistently great in the roles he gets. Especially iZombie. But iZombie is worth checking out for other reasons, too.

So turns out I’m a bit of a sucker for Flanigan’s particular brand of sadness, schmaltz, and spookiness in these shows. Are any of his movies of similar tone and worth seeing?

Before I Wake, on Netflix, could easily have been a chapter in Hill House.

I would stay away from Gerald’s Game, Absentia, Hush, and Oculus, if you’re looking for schmaltz. There’s really not much in any of those four films.

Ouija: Origin of Evil sits between those four and his schmaltzier work. Plus, it has Henry Thomas in his first collaboration with Flanagan.

Doctor Sleep is based on Stephen King’s book sequel to The Shining. I didn’t really care for it, but it’s kind of fascinating to see how he blends the book’s version of events with popular culture’s conception of a Shining sequel.

Ah, fantastic. Thanks! I remember hearing that the Ouija sequel defied all expectations by being good. I’ll add that and Before I Wake to the watchlist.

Disagree about Gerald’s Game. Simple and small movie done well mainly because Carla Cugino is good as the main.

I did see Gerald’s Game. Didn’t realize it was the same director, though I can’t recall if I saw it before or after Hill House. I thought it was pretty good, though I wisely fast forwarded through a specific bit near the end.

Gerald’s Game is good. (Minus the reveal at the end.) It’s mostly held up by Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood. It’s not schmaltzy though.

This was really bad.

I think my biggest problem is that it didn’t hold together thematically as a ghost story. Reading a bit about it after the fact, this is basically a supercut mashup of Henry James ghost stories, and it really feels that way. E.g. the Harry Potter glasses ghost and the alter ego had nothing to do with the core story. Just from a writing perspective, there’s no coherence. Dani’s past trauma had no thematic tie to the children or with Viola’s story. There was a bunch of discussion of class, and of sexuality / infidelity, and none of it really tied into the core mystery of the house, which was “what if a lady was real stubborn sometimes”.

There were threads of a bunch of good stories, but none of them paid off or tied together at all. And to top it off, it wasn’t even particularly spooky. In keeping with the supercut thing, it felt like a good half the show was flashbacks introducing new characters that I didn’t care about, and doing it as slowly as possible. This could have been a great 1 or two movies, but 10 hours of series was just too long. Also, the actress playing Dani’s continuous stammering panic was one of my least favorite performances of all time.

The bits with the Alter Ego featured some fun scenery chewing, and the episode with the housekeeper’s time-jumps sequence had a lot of potential. But overall, I think it was a big waste of time.

The only saving grace is the memes.
image

Well finished this and guess I’m alone in overall liking it. Its a very slow burn for the first 5 episodes or so but I liked the last few when it picked up and the connections started to happen. I liked the ‘epilogue’ part and feel its needed to finish the full story up. Also was really slow in not realizing who the women telling the story was. Didn’t dawn on me until it was just her and the bride talking at the end.

Anyways the first season was definitely better, but I’d go with a decent 7/10 for Bly.

And as the bride said at the end, its not really a ghost story but a love story.

You’re not alone, my girlfriend and I both really dug it for the most part. Episode 5 was astonishingly good - creepy and sad. But overall I think it’s more meditation on loss and grief and death (and love) than it is horror, so if you’re there for the latter I can understand being disappointed (I was to start with but I’m cool with what it was doing also). I do agree that the penultimate episode felt pretty unnecessary and I wasn’t much fonder of the last episode than Hill House’s…but it did fit the rest of the series more than the one in Hill House.

God, poor Rebecca. I was almost willing to be sympathetic to the show’s more nuanced version of Peter Quint until the scene where he kills her.

It isn’t much of an adaptation of Turn of the Screw really (though more than Hill House was of the Jackson novel), mind. The Innocents is still the way to go there. More so than reading the story, too, IMO - James is practically intolerable as a writer.