Kristal Blankinship
web coordinator

Created by Mike Flanagan, the horror series “The Haunting of Bly Manor” landed on Netflix more than a week ago. 

The series was inspired by the ghostly tales of Henry James, including the 1898 horror novella “The Turn of the Screw.” 

Flanagan has a remarkable way of ensuring the audience cares for the characters by enveloping the story in their psychological traumas. 

Instead of focusing on a character’s backstory over an episode, he uses monologues and a maze of memories to trace hidden scars. 

Taking an ‘80s setting, the story unfolds a beautiful tragedy with meticulous attention to detail. 

Bright-eyed American Dani Clayton, played by Victoria Pedretti, finds herself in the gorgeous Bly Manor surrounded by emerald green English countryside. 

She hopes to make a difference caring for two children: Flora and Miles, played by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and Amelie Smith. 

Before long, Dani starts to see strangers around the property, and that’s where things all start to unravel. 

The mystery surrounds the deaths of the children’s parents as well as the previous governess Rebecca Jessel, who drowned in the nearby lake. 

Dani also seems to have as many secrets in her past as the family who hired her. 

Bly Manor is hypnotic. Each episode leaves viewers asking questions, enticing them to keep watching. 

The story leaves them lost in a labyrinth constructed of emotional memories, confusing hallucinations and ghostly visions, losing one’s will to reach the exit. 

All until “Bly Manor” hands the viewer a map in Episode Eight, a narrative cop-out dressed up in period clothing, slathered with even more voice-over. 

It’s an episode that does so much explaining that the viewer starts to think the series is done, but there is another long episode. 

Only here does the viewer understand what the series’ main focus was meant to be throughout all of the different character backstories that took up so much time.