With one week to go before The Haunting of Bly Manor premieres on Netflix, the opening titles for the new series have been released online. The show is the second season in the Haunting anthology that kicked off with 2018’s brilliant and spooky and emotionally devastating The Haunting of Hill House. This new season, Bly Manor, has an entirely new story and new characters, but a few familiar faces on the acting front and Mike Flanagan is once again the showrunner.
Set in the 1980s, The Haunting of Bly Manor is based on the works of author Henry James – namely the iconic The Turn of the Screw. It finds Victoria Pedretti (a standout from Hill House) filling the lead role of a young American nanny who is selected to care for two orphaned children after their au pair’s tragic death. They reside at Bly Manor with the estate’s chef Owen (Rahul Kohli), groundskeeper Jamie (Amelia Eve), and housekeeper Mrs. Grose (T’Nia Miller), but all is not what it seems.
Flanagan recently explained that whereas Hill House was a ghost story about grief, Bly Manor is very much a Gothic romance. So it should be fun to see how that tonal shift reflects in the story and mood. He returned to direct the first episode of Bly Manor, but unlike Hill House he only helmed that one installment of Bly and handed over directing duties for the rest of the episodes to a handful of other filmmakers.
These opening credits offer some great looks at the new cast members while also offering a tantalizing tease of what’s to come. You’ll recall that the Hill House opening credits were pretty thematically tied to what happened in that show, so it’ll be fun to see how these melting portraits connect with the story of Bly Manor. Also notice that the music is almost identical to that of the Hill House credits.
Check out the Haunting of Bly Manor opening credits below. The series premieres on Netflix on October 9th and also stars Amelie Bea Smith, Benjamin Ainsworth, Henry Thomas, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Katie Siegel, and Tahirah Sharif.
Here’s the official synopsis for The Haunting of Bly Manor:
From The Haunting of Hill House creator Mike Flanagan and producer Trevor Macy comes THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR, the next highly anticipated chapter of The Haunting anthology series, set in 1980s England. After an au pair’s tragic death, Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) hires a young American nanny (Victoria Pedretti) to care for his orphaned niece and nephew (Amelie Bea Smith, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) who reside at Bly Manor with the estate’s chef Owen (Rahul Kohli), groundskeeper Jamie (Amelia Eve) and housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (T’Nia Miller). But all is not as it seems at the manor, and centuries of dark secrets of love and loss are waiting to be unearthed in this chilling gothic romance. At Bly Manor, dead doesn’t mean gone.
Producing partners Flanagan and Macy drew from the iconic supernatural stories of Henry James, to create the ensemble drama which also stars Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Kate Siegel, and Tahirah Sharif. The series is executive produced by Flanagan and Macy for Intrepid Pictures, along with Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey for Amblin Television.
