Chances are, if you’re anything like us, you’ve already sprinted through Netflix’s spine-tingling The Haunting of Bly Manor, Mike Flanagan’s follow-up to the equally spooky The Haunting of Hill House. This time around, the emphasis might have been more Gothically romantic, but these new episodes were crammed full of visual Easter eggs and esoteric storytelling detail that we’ve come to expect. In short: there is a lot to talk about when it comes to The Haunting of Bly Manor.

So you can imagine how thrilled we were to get invited to a roundtable discussion of the series with Flanagan and producer Trevor Macy, in which no limit was placed on the amount of spoiler-y questions we (and a small band of select journalists) could ask. Unlike some of the dustier areas of Bly Manor, nothing was off limits when it came to this chat.

If you haven’t seen the season yet, turn back now (but please return when you have finished it), major spoilers are ahead.

And for those that are still here, we’ve prepared a brief outline of the lengthy and incredibly in-depth talk, in case you want to skip to the part that really interests you.

Topics in order of discussion:

  • Hidden Ghosts
  • Episode 8 Explained
  • Multiple adaptations of The Turning of the Screw
  • Queer representation and the Dani/Jamie love story
  • Why 9 episodes and why there won’t be extended cuts
  • Dream Skipping
  • Why Flanagan didn’t direct all the episodes, and choosing the directors
  • Ending explained and if Dani is there at the end
  • Defining the “haunting” as Viola’s gravity vs. a stomach in Hill House and how Flanagan comes up with the explanations for the hauntings.
  • What did they learn from Hill House that went into Bly?
  • How Peter was originally more of a villain and how Oliver changed Mike’s mind about the character, and how making him more complex prevented Rebecca from being painted as a dummy for falling for him.
  • Dealing with the ambiguity in the source material, and making explicit which ghosts are real and which are imagined.
  • Why it’s set in the 80s
  • Easter eggs from The Shining and The Innocents and other horror fiction, and toxic fandom vs. communal fandom that brings people together
the-haunting-of-bly-manor-victoria-pedretti-dani-clayton
Image via Netflix

One of the things that I genuinely love most about what you did both in the first season and this season is just when you hide the ghosts in the background of shots. I'm curious to the art of that. When did you decide when a good moment is to hide someone back there? How do you decide? How well do you want it?

MIKE FLANAGAN: Well, for one thing I can tell you and this is was Trevor's idea, was no matter how many ghosts there are hidden in the season, even if you find them all, we're going to tell you there's two more. There's really no downside to that for us. It started as part of the pitch for Hill House that was something we were really excited about. I love those pictures that go viral now. Again, where you see somebody, it's always captioned like wait till you see it or something like that. You spot the face under the couch or something. I love that stuff.

In the first season, it was really just kind of a little spice we wanted to put on it. We didn't really want to do anything with it other than kind of create that kind of re-watchability and hopefully just spook out a couple of people. We executed it by having extras dressed and in makeup every day standing by, usually at the crafty table just kind of eating candy and waiting for every shot to go up. We would look for an opportunity to throw them in.

It would be as fast as after we finish our first team rehearsal, flying and go. See if we can find a spot. This season though we didn't want to do that again. For Bly, it was important that if we could find a way that the ghosts could actually be part of the narrative this time instead of so many random faces, if we could kind of cast them, which is a tough sell for a performer to say we want you to play a part where hopefully we never notice you and you hopefully not seen until the end, but I wanted it to really fit into the story and that we'd find out eventually who they were.

Yeah. This year it was a lot more surgical. Some of them were written into drafts where they would be, especially the plague doctor and the doll face ghost, in particular, but then it was just the usual thing on set of trying to figure out if a ghost was too visible or too obvious as they were. Yeah.

TREVOR MACY: That's a funny process, because you end up, you walk onto set and there's the plague doctor standing right by the staircase using the t-rex, if I don't move they can't see me. It's like, "Well, maybe a little too obvious. Let's move into the corner." That kind of thing. That happened a lot. But it was a question of dialing it in.

FLANAGAN: I would always try not to tell the cast if there was going to be a ghost in the shot. I like to mess with them that way. Sometimes they don't notice until their take is over and they turn around and someone's in the fireplace. Occasionally, we forget about them. We bury them so deep in the background, it happened to the plague doctor all the time on the exteriors. We'd place him by the lake way deep and we'd be frantic to kind of keep our day going. We'd move on and realize we'd left Liam out there in the water. Patiently waiting for us to tell him to move.

What are the chances that there's still an actor out there like waiting to hear cut like just waiting for you guys to come grab him?

FLANAGAN: To be honest, I haven't heard from Liam since we wrapped, so for all I know he's still in that puddle, but I hope they're as fun this year. We made them a little harder to find in some cases, but I hope you guys enjoy them. I hope they pop out.

the-haunting-of-bly-manor-finale-image-2
Image via Netflix

I want to talk to you about family, because that's an ongoing theme in your work and given how the family unit in Hill House is blood related and the family unit in this one is more of a chosen family, can you talk about the importance of switching that up and how that is impactful to the story? I guess also to you, because you kind of have your own onset chosen family with a lot of people that you keep working with.

FLANAGAN: Yeah. I think that difference between the family we inherit and the family we choose is something that I'm very interested in. I know Trevor is too. We talk a lot about members of this cast and of our crew being family like you said that's something that's been important to us and intrepid for a couple of years. I think with Hill House a lot of us that worked on it poured so much information and inspiration about our own nuclear families and about our extended families into it that I feel like we kind of emptied those missile silos a little bit, and because so much of the structure of Hill House was about those family dynamics and about, one of the things I love about a family is the characters just come with this baked in way of dealing with each other.

They've got all these years of history, it makes writing them really fun. It makes performing them really fun, because subtext just goes out the window and they just speak to each other like they'd never speak to anyone else. We intentionally didn't want to do that again. A lot of Bly, the early conversations of Bly were about how to make sure we didn't succumb to the temptation of just repeating what we thought worked about Hill House, which was a very tempting thing. It was one of those things where we could kind of look at the reactions that the first season had and see very clearly the things that it seemed we should try to avoid, lest it just be a rehash of themes that we've been playing with before. That idea of portraying a family that we choose coming together and having the characters have to get to know each other in real time while, we, the audience got to know them, that just made for a very different approach from a writing perspective for the season and that was one of the things that was attractive about it, because we were pulling from a lot of disparate sources, as well a lot of different Henry James stories.

There was always this sense of characters from one story coming and meeting characters from another. There was a sense that this season had a ton of introductions that were required of it, whereas Hill House, we needed to believe that everybody on screen knew each other better than anyone else. It's still a story about family, I think, but kind of no one in this story has that anchor of a family. That's something that was really fun to play with.

MACY: Yeah. It's interesting to watch to think that there's this trauma in season one that sort of breaks this family apart and there's separate traumas this season that sort of brings these people together. It's really interesting.

FLANAGAN: Yeah, and then that inversion of it is something that, that's the kind of stuff that gets us excited when we're breaking a season. That idea that we could potentially tell a mirrored kind of inverted version of some of the things we were talking about in season one made it seem worthwhile, because the last thing any of us wanted to do was give you guys and give the audience just kind of a reheated version of what we put out before. We were always looking for ways to twist it upside down and just actively say, "What's the opposite approach that'll still let us do something that feels like it's part of the same, part of the same series, something that connects it, but still makes it feel a little different? We hope.

the-haunting-of-bly-manor-victoria-pedretti-amelia-eve
Photo by Eike Schroter/Netflix

You mentioned in previous interviews that Turn of the Screw was a jumping off point more than like a road map for the whole arc of the season. That's pretty obvious and that's how you get Dani to Bly, but I want to know how in your conversations and breaking the story of this season did you get from Dani shows up at Bly to this incredible sweeping love story between Dani and Jamie that runs the length of the season?

FLANAGAN: I'm so glad to hear that. The Turn of the Screw always came up in the same sentence when we would talk about The Haunting of Hill House as far as what are the most influential examples of classic horror literature that we could think of. It's really hard as you start to look into that world if you're talking about Hill House, Turn of the Screw is kind of in the next breath. It seemed, again, to be a very obvious kind of way to go, and not obvious in a bad way. It felt to me like it was essentially the way we had to go. The fun of it though was that kind of from the beginning with Hill House, we would say, "Yes. It's a ghost story, but it's also, it's really about grief." That's something Trevor and I talk about all the time is, what is it about with the capital A?

The lowercase A is it's about a family living in a haunted house. The capital A, it's about grief and loss and death or familial trauma. We had started that way on the last season and that it had served us very well to always kind of keep that as the North Star. Again, in that interest of trying to not repeat any of that, the idea that this should be a proper love story was one of the very first things that we presented with the material. In The Turn of the Screw, short of what seems to be a brief flirtation between the governess and the children's uncle, there's really nothing about it that lends itself to a love story. So that immediately gives us a lot of room to move, and looking for real estate is one of the first things we have to do approaching a story like this, because much like the Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw lends itself perfectly to a feature film adaptation. There's just enough material there to make a great movie, to stretch it out over a season is going to require a lot of invention.

So looking for ways that we know can kind of create that real estate is very important. The idea of doing a true gothic romance and of focusing on the love story above all else, that was baked into the original pitch for this, and the question became how to take the other Henry James sources, how to fold them together? If our goal was to basically use this ghost story as an excuse to tell a tragic love story, to see a relationship be born, kind of peak, and then to die and to live in the echo of that loss, that seemed like we… The season was about something with a capital A all of a sudden, and how to service that became our big priority and by the time we struck into some of the beautiful and very romantic themes that were embedded in a lot of the Henry James books, especially my favorite being The Romance of Certain Old Clothes which cracked this season wide open for us.

It became very fun to kind of realize that we could just focus, not only on Dani and Jamie's love story, but on these other love stories that will all colliding that you had kind of the inverse of Dani and Jamie with Peter and Rebecca as this toxic love story. Is this really passionate, but very unhealthy version of love? Then, you also had Hannah and Owen to play with and that was another love story, and then Henry and Charlotte. There were all these wonderful ways to talk about love, but to show all its faces or at least show as many faces as we could think of could fit in these nine episodes, but I'm really hoping that that lands because it's not the most obvious pitch to make with a horror series is to say that what we're really excited about is the love story. It kind of sounds like we're working against the interests of the genre, but I would argue and I hope to show our viewers that that isn't true at all. They're very much the same thing.

MACY: Yeah. We had to smuggle that in a little bit, but at least when you compare the marketing materials to the show itself, but we're big believers in the idea that you can do both. Scary is not the enemy of romantic capital R.

FLANAGAN: I found those of my relationships to be fucking terrifying in my life so this seems to go hand in hand whether you wanted to or not.

haunting-of-bly-manor-mike-flanagan-netflix-flora-miss-jessel
Image via Netflix

I really love the big flashback episode. I think it's the second to last one. I want to talk ask about that. What were you excited about doing in that sort of format different from what you've done before and also what were the challenges in an episode like that?

FLANAGAN: That episode is my favorite this season. The short story The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, other than having I think the best title of any short ghost story I've ever heard, in it I thought were the seeds of so many things that have become embedded in contemporary horror. You read the story as it is and you can see kind of the inspirations for The Ring and for The Grudge. You see this example of supernatural revenge and you imagined, it's so beautifully described in the book that they find the poor woman splayed out in front of the trunk with this frozen expression of horror on her face and the bruises of the fingers around her neck from the ghost that strangled her, and not only is that more aggressive and vicious than anything else Henry James ever wrote about a ghost, most of his ghosts are like incredibly polite and they just kind of like, "Oh, hello." That was fantastic. But to me, it really shows how some of the ideas Henry James first put out there have caught on either consciously or subconsciously over the years and have continued to inform the genre. That story was always going to be one of the crown jewels of this season.

The other thing that was super exciting about it was that in Hill House, we had intended to do a full history of the Hill family and of the residents of Hill House prior to the Crains moving in. We didn't get to do it. We had written it, we had cast it, we had scheduled it, it got excised before we could shoot it as we struggled to try to get the season done on time and on budget. That was the thing that we sacrificed on the altar of our good behavior, but the idea for this that we could actually go back and tell the story of The Haunting itself and of the ghosts so that they weren't so hard to kind of connect to our protagonists. That was really exciting. It was like this time, we can actually go back, we can do a proper period piece. We have this beautiful piece of material. It seemed like such a great opportunity for Kate (Catherine Parker) and for Katie [Siegel], both of whom we couldn't find kind of an overarching series regular role for in the story as it was structured.

This was such a wonderful chance to bring back those actresses and to be able to say, and we're going to dig into this, we're going to look at The Innocents. We're going to look at The Haunting. We're going to look at classic black and white horror and we're going to try to make this a love letter to an era of cinema that much like Henry James the short story is still influencing work today. That comes from a time when it was about atmosphere and dread and character development and not about jump scares and gore and special effects. It really is kind of the collision of a lot of the things that are the most important to us and Axelle Carolyn, who directed that episode is also a student of classic black and white horror cinema and came to it with so many exciting ideas of how she wanted to tell it when it came to the costume design for that episode, which was this juggernaut compared to the rest of the season.

I mean how exciting that was for Lynn Falconer and for [Siegel and Parker], kind of everybody was always looking at Episode 8 as our chance to do what we love the most and what made us want to do The Haunting at all, which is to kind of look back at Robert Wise and Jack Clayton and those incredibly influential movies from the early '60s, which were done so perfectly they've rendered it pointless to try to do a faithful feature adaptation of these texts.

It was one of those episodes, much like Episode 6 in Season 1 that we were preparing for and building up to the entire time. We shot it last. We had finished our A story and made it all the way to the end, and then we had to redress everything, redress the interior of the house, the exterior of the house, get rid of all the electric light fixtures, put in all the candle sconces, completely change everything over and just got to kind of finish the experience of making the season with this beautiful kind of stand-alone truly kind of gothic romantic black and white period piece, which hopefully we wanted to pull everything else together to give us a satisfying mythology for our monster and for our ghost that also helped humanize her.

It was some of the times that for both Trevor and I, we spent the most time on set when we weren't putting out… Throughout the season there's all these other fires you're putting out, you're running back and forth and that's why we relied on the directors that we chose to kind of hold down the fort on the ground, and I was never more anxious to get to set just to sit at monitor and watch than I was during Episode 8, because it was so cool every time they put a frame up, it was just like this is truly exciting. It was the kind of episode I just wanted to see as a fan.

MACY: We also talk a lot about the idea of how can you do something that's different that fits intrinsically into the story? Like Episode 6 in the first season and we challenge ourselves to do that as often as we can. It doesn't work in every show, but when it does and you can do it, it's really fun for us, and hopefully, for the audience.

haunting-of-bly-manor-mike-flanagan-netflix-victoria-pedretti
Image via Netflix

You kind of hit on some of what I'm about to ask in an earlier response, but I'm curious because IMDB says that this is the 35th adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, including one very, very recently. So my question is, how do you keep a story this well-trod fresh? What were the pitfalls you avoided? What would you say to some hardcore Henry James fan who's seen it all to convince them that Bly Manor, it has something new to offer them and that they should be excited to check it out?

FLANAGAN: Great question. First of all, I want to meet the hardcore Henry James fan, the jaded cynical hardcore Henry James fan is a person I really want to get to know, because I do believe they're out there. I think you're absolutely right. They were definitely out there on Hill House, the Shirley Jackson fans of which I am one, but for Henry James and Shirley Jackson. I always try to filter every decision we're going to make through that lens first, but with Turn of the Screw, in particular, it had some parallels to The Haunting of Hill House in that there was kind of a seminal classic adaptation from the early '60s that I adored. Then, there were more modern adaptations that for various reasons didn't seem to work.

In the case of this one, we hadn't seen the most recent adaptation until we were well down the path. So we just tried to keep that out of our minds. We kind of figured no matter how that went we were going to be off in a different direction anyway. So even if they delivered the quintessential faithful adaptation of the source material, we were confident we were going to be something else. The thing that opened it up was these other stories, was the availability of Henry James's other public domain works that had not been adopted. It's always a daunting thing to try to figure out how to step into something that is beloved by any percentage of its audience. Something that has an existing fan base, and unfortunately, we'd already kind of been through the crucible of Hill House and Doctor Sleep by the time this came up and I didn't think it would ever, I didn't think the Henry James fans would be as well armed as the Kubrick fans.

There was kind of a sense that if we survived the Overlook, we hopefully would be able to get through The Haunting of Bly Manor, but the critical thing is to try to approach what works really, really well about the established adaptations while also being very aware of how many times a certain choice has been made. This is one of those situations where there were moments I wanted to be directly quoting previous adaptations.

The first appearance of Peter Quint to Dani, the shot sequence is a direct quotation of Jack Clayton's work in The Innocents. The rest of the time though it was critical to us to stay as far away from anything that felt familiar as we could. Unfortunately, these other sources allowed us to do that. Whenever we felt like we were walking down too familiar of a path with The Turn of the Screw, we always had another story to pivot to. We always had another character to pivot to, while we were confident that people would have expectations for how we handled Mrs. Grose, we were also confident that our interpretation of her had not appeared in any of the adaptations up to this point depending on whether or not you consider The Others to be an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw and I do.

But we would debate these things and we would be very careful to choose moments. It became about picking the moments to be familiar. It landed mostly in the first episode where we had to rely on people's familiarity with the story and we had to take advantage of the fact that Miles and Flora and the arrival of their governess is so familiar, so that we could veer sharply off of that almost instantly, and at least announce at that point that we were going in a different direction. I would say to the hardcore Henry James fans, what I hope brings you into this adaptation is that you're going to be able to see some of your favorite stories that you've never been able to see before with The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, with The Jolly Corner. I was particularly pleased with the way we twisted around The Beast in the Jungle, which is one of my favorite Henry James shorts. I think, for them, I wish we'd had the opportunity in The Haunting of Hill House to be able to play around and be able to reverently homage more of Shirley Jackson's work. We didn't have that opportunity, because the rights are spoken for, but this seemed like a really good opportunity to do that. I hope that fans of Henry James's work will find a lot to celebrate here. I guess we'll find out.

the-haunting-of-bly-manor-amelia-eve-victoria-pedretti
Photo by Eike Schroter/Netflix

So something that really deeply resonated with me watching this season was how Dani dealt with and like the intersection of her own queer identity as a woman. We talk a lot about how queer stories and horror stories often intersect, but I've never really seen anything this way. She's dealing with compulsory heterosexuality. She's dealing with her own internalized homophobia. What inspired that? How did you come about giving her that specific story in that way?

FLANAGAN: I'd say that's a priority not only for the series, but for Intrepid in general. That's something that's been on our minds as the years have gone by because like most writers, we all default to stories that remind us of ourselves first. It's the easiest place to be and that's where you want to have something personal to say, so you pull into your own history. One of the challenges that we've put to every writer in the writers room is not only to kind of dig as deep into your own story as you can, but to really as empathetically as possible try to expand the story outside of your own biography and outside of the corners of the world that you know the most. With the way Theodora Crain evolved when we were working on Season 1, this seemed like a really wonderful thing to do.

It seemed like a chance to make the world a little bit better conversationally, at least, and if we were going to tell a ghost story that's one thing, but if we're going to tell a love story, if we're really going to tell a love story, then it was important to all of us to tell a love story when you talk about things that have been done over and over and things that are too familiar. What's a love story that hasn't had as much representation out there in popular media? What's something that younger viewers, since we were aware we get a lot of younger viewers on The Haunting, we learned that with Hill House. What's something that might help them with something that might inspire them? We decided kind of before we broke the season that the love story that we would focus on is going to be between Dani and Jamie, not between Dani and Owen, which is kind of what seemed to be the boring way to do it.

That decision was part of the original pitch out for the season, and as we populated the writer's room, the degree to which it was important to some of our writers on a personal level was something that was really exciting. Julia Bicknell who wrote the finale of this season, she and her wife, who also works in the industry, this was something as she put to us, this was the kind of story that she wished she had seen when she was growing up, and so when it came to Dani and Jamie, it was very important to me that we always were looking very closely at the expressions Julia was making at the table, and just asking her what was important about it. What would she specifically have wanted her younger self to see?

It's something you're going to see more of as we get into Midnight Mass and Midnight Club. It's a type of representation that's important to us as individuals, to us as fathers and husbands and citizens of the planet really. I hope it's very important to us that we try to get it as right as we can. I hope we do okay. We're surrounding ourselves with people who can teach us how to present it properly, and the opportunity for us to learn more about the different shades and expressions and shapes and sizes of love of our fellow human beings is a wonderful way for us to learn on every project. If we run out of things to learn there's no reason in doing any of this. So, yeah.

How did you guys decide on nine episodes? Was it ever almost going to be eight? Was it almost ever going to be 10? Do you guys have extended cuts of any of these episodes that could be seeing the light of day at some point?

MACY: Well, I'll take the episode count one. The first season was obviously 10. The natural gravity in the world of television is to make the second season the same as the first season. We felt once we were breaking the story, it became pretty clear to us that nine was the right number for this in that, and Mike, who is a passionate advocate of structure and story said it best. There's sort of a three-act structure with three episodes each in the show, and so fortunately, when we went back to Netflix and Paramount and Amblin and said something that no one ever says which is, "We'd like to make fewer of these." They were pretty cool about it.

FLANAGAN: One of my favorite parts of this process whenever we get to do any long format storytelling is I'm a nut for structure. I think structure, it's like sculpture. I think in the way that human beings assign beauty to things that are symmetrical, there's a lot that's true about that in the way you structure a story, and as I would draw out on the board, it looks like there's giant weird cross between like a strange kind of snowflake crystal and a TIE fighter. We draw it out on the board. I would map it out and we started with 10, and every time I would say it just has a rhythm, this season works like a waltz up until episode 10 and at that point, it just trips over its feet and it just felt like one episode was always filler no matter how I tried to structure it. There was always one that just stuck out that made me feel like if I removed it, nothing would be affected and that kind of proper three count for it just structurally and rhythmically felt so right that I still can't believe they let us get away with it. But, yes, it was always nine once we drew the structure out. I don't think we ever entertained eight, because that had the same problem, and then it felt like one episode was actually too stuffed together, but we try to let the story dictate what it wants to be instead of kind of trying to have a target and Netflix is one of the only places I know of to work with television where that's okay and where they're going to want to know what the story wants to be.

Midnight Mass, which we're shooting now is seven episodes and that's just because of where that fell and there's all sorts of crazy reasons for that, but some of which are biblical. It's wacky the way this stuff happens, but there won't be extended cuts for this one though. I know that on Hill House, we were saving a lot of extended cuts, specifically for a potential home video release, which we were lucky enough to get. On this one, the cuts that are out there are pretty much it. We didn't shoot more. We were a little more efficient this time I think. We shot what we needed and we were moving at a pace that just with Season 1, we didn't have all the scripts written by the time we started shooting, so there were editorial choices that were still happening in production. With this one, all the scripts were done before we rolled, so they'd been through it a little bit and had been edited a little more. But, yeah, sadly there won't be any other versions of these. I think this one is what it is.

haunting-of-bly-manor-kate-siegel
Image via Netflix

Can you give us an explanation of what dream skipping is, when it happens, and who’s affected by it?

FLANAGAN: Sure. Sure. So, our idea was that the experience of being a ghost was something we really could really dig into this season. So if you die on the grounds of Bly Manor, the first thing that happens is you go through a period of intense denial and that's where we had Hannah, and that's that kind of Wile E. Coyote metaphor that Peter Miles brings up later. During that time, we tried to illustrate it with Peter Quint when he's first killed in the fifth episode. When you see him come out and he doesn't remember what happened and he picks up the doll and as he stares at it in his hand and starts to remember, it falls through. So the idea was that this first stage of it was this kind of dreamed life that people could still carry on. They could dream up new clothes for themselves, which Hannah does, why she keeps kind of changing her outfit scene to scene, physically interact with the world, appear to people, because they're always putting out the effort because of muscle memory and denial basically.

But that once you accept the fact that you're dead like Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff, at that point, a whole bunch of the rules immediately change. Once that realization kicks in, you're no longer able to reliably affect the world physically, and at that point, your experience of your life as you try to experience this new way of living becomes very non-linear. At that point, you're kind of involuntarily bouncing back and forth between what is the present, what is the past, what is the future because of what Nellie said in season one that moments aren't linear, they aren't like dominoes; once you're on the other side of death your entire life falls around you like rain or like confetti.

So dream hopping is really bouncing back between those moments. Playing the part as you remember them. What was really fun to play with here was that idea of the decay of memory. They say we each die twice, that we die that our body ceases to be, and then we die when we're forgotten, right? That idea that a ghost is subject to that deterioration, that as their own memories fade and people's memories of them fade, the ghost kind of physically fades, all the stuff goes away, but that their memories become less and less reliable. That's what Hannah is going through the entire time. She's trying to hold on to some semblance of linear existence, but she's killed seconds before Dani first arrives to meet her in the first episode. When we meet her, she's only been dead for a few seconds. She's still staring down at her body in the well, and Miles is just coming out of his moment of possession. Their very first scene is she just died, but after that, you see her interacting with things, but she never actually drinks tea or eats food. She makes up excuses for it all the time. She appears and disappears, we never know where she lives or Dani keeps talking about how she can't find her. She turns around she's gone, so that's happening, meanwhile the ghosts who have been dead longer than Hannah are also going through this, but they're further through it.

So Rebecca Jessel is bouncing all over the place and she's reliving kind of the peaks of her love story with Peter and also the worst parts. But interestingly, Peter Quint is only being stuffed back into the worst memory of his life, which I think as a proper little atheist like I am, that to me is hell. It's not a lake of fire. It's that when we're dead, we live in our moments of the most shame or regret and if we're stuck there, the repetition of that I think is about as hellacious as anything I can imagine. So Peter's off in that world, but they both want to come back and inhabit, possess a living body, so that they can leave the grounds of Bly and have a new life. In order to do that they have to work on Miles and Flora and basically convince Miles and Flora to seed the control over their minds and bodies, to basically leave the conscious and be tucked away in the subconscious.

So they've been teaching them while alive to hop in and out of their memories in their own imaginations. That is basically like dreaming, they will relinquish control over their conscious mind long enough for Peter to take the wheel. It's a place that keeps them docile. It keeps them from pushing these interfering spirits back out of their bodies. More and more frequently as Peter gets better at doing this and as Rebecca gets better at doing this to Flora, the kids don't have that control. They're not voluntarily giving up that driver's seat. They're being pushed aside and pushed into some pleasant memory, none of which is real and that the kids know on some level isn't real in order to keep them quiet.

The end game is to reduce these children's souls basically into a size that is so small that they'll just forever exist in these little memories and these ghosts can just walk out in their bodies and have another chance at life. That's the very long version of what took us six months to figure out in the writers room as we tried to break it.

haunting-of-bly-manor-miles-dani
Image via Netflix

What was behind the decision for you not to direct all of the episodes yourself? How did you choose the directors that you wanted to use on the show and how did you kind of keep a unified vision with all these multiple filmmakers who were doing, for example, something specific like Axelle was?

FLANAGAN: Right. Well, it was a complicated decision actually. When we first started talking about a second season coming off of Hill House, I was not in great shape. I lost like 40 pounds in production and came out of it really kind of a shell of myself. Hill House almost killed me. So when the appetite for a second season came up, I had this pretty intense exhaustion going and I felt at the time that I didn't know that I could do that again. Now, I'm doing it for Midnight Mass so it got better, but at the time it was also something important to us, at Intrepid, that we didn't only create content that relied on me having to do that. One of the things that's important to both Trevor and I is to let our company — now that it's become successful — to let it be a launch pad for other independent talent that haven't yet broken into television in a lot of cases, and to celebrate artists whose vision we really love. The filmmakers that we chose for this season are filmmakers who've made movies we love and that's kind of where it started. It was really easy. I watch a lot of movies and when I saw Dark Song, I just freaked out and it was like, "We have to find a way to work with Liam. We have to find a way to support him.” This was an opportunity to do that.

Same when we saw Cargo, and Ben and Yolanda's work was so wonderful, and that Trevor had just produced a film with Ciaran [Foy] while we were working on Season 1, so he's another artist that we were very keen to try to support. I think initially the feeling was I wanted to treat the season like a normal showrunner and to learn that side of things. There was a desperation to Hill House where I really felt like it might be my only chance in television, so I couldn't let anything out of my hands even for a minute. I think with this it was important to us both that we proved to ourselves, to Netflix, that we could manage a series properly, and that meant we could still maintain a consistency of vision and tone and try to wrangle all of that, but grow a new skill set for me at the same time.

MACY: Yeah. To be 100% clear, this is very much Mike's creation and even in this season he has his fingerprints all over it. There's not a lot of daylight between him directing it and us doing something we're passionate about, which is picking these great voices that you haven't seen on television before, because the theory we had was that doing a two-episode block is very similar to doing a great two-hour movie, because you have 20 days in either case and you're scrambling the whole time. They really embraced kind of the ethic that Mike put forth in the first one, and as a director, and the continuity of us and of Mike as showrunner is a pretty big gravity well if you will.

FLANAGAN: All that said though, I thought this would be something of a relief and that it would be a little less of a footprint on me in my life than the first season, but it sure doesn't feel like it at the end of the day and really —

MACY: But you haven't lost 40 pounds?

FLANAGAN: No. I did manage to keep most of me this time, but it didn't turn out to be kind of the step back that I think we had all hoped it would be in the beginning, and part of that is just because I'll never be able to help it. I hope I didn't drive the directors too crazy.

MACY: You will see us doing that in the future and including with some of these directors and that's something we're super passionate about, because we think a lot about like, "How do you do something that doesn't look like everything else on TV?" Which is hard, and part of that is we think of film and TV as a permeable membrane, finding those filmmakers who can fit into the framework that we've established is really fun for us.

FLANAGAN: Yeah. This group is a really, really terrific talent and they brought a much needed new perspective too, because I do feel like a lot of us on Season 1 really, we really did kind of exhaust our arsenal, and so having fresh eyes and fresh ideas come into it is also really important. You guys have seen how I hide the ghost so many times now and it was really neat to see how someone else would do it, and how they would approach it. I hope that keeps it feeling not repetitive, but it was not an easy call. It's going to vacillate back and forth I think as we continue to make shows, because there are some where I'm just like, "No. I'm grabbing all of this." There are others where I'm really enjoying kind of learning how to support other filmmakers who haven't yet had a lot of the opportunities that I've had and the more we can do to support them the better the industry will be I think.

the-haunting-of-bly-manor-lady-in-the-lake
Image via Netflix

The finale as a whole and I'm really interested in knowing how early on you knew Dani would become the Lady of the Lake, and if in your mind, if this is something you're comfortable to speak to, in those final moments is Dani with Jamie or is that something where she came to her in that final moment?

FLANAGAN: The bracketed imagery of starting with Jamie asleep on the chair. In the pilot, it was meant to be the very first shot you ever saw was over Carla [Gugino’s] shoulder, and then we were going to end the series on the exact same shot, but there would be a hand there. That was one of the very first things that was pitched for it. So in my mind, yes. I'm a bit of a sap with this stuff, but I think Dani's absolutely with her. I think that's the thing for me about a great love story is that even if you can't see that person anymore, even if they're gone, any kind of love, romantic love, familial love, deep friendship, even if you can't see them anymore. The idea that you're looking for them puts them with you, whether you can feel it or not.

That was the kind of beginning and ending image that we really always, always wanted for this season. The fact that Carla was going to be handling those two brackets, that she was going to open and close the story, that was something that made me very excited, because I love collaborating with Carla and we were like, "Can we keep her a secret?" It was going to be really cool. That was always baked in. For me, the whole season was always about what Carla says to Flora at the end at the fireplace. That couple of paragraphs about the biggest question. When you talk about ghosts and loss, and in Season 1 we talked an awful lot about the different things a ghost could be, and we talked about a ghost being a wish the most, and that question of I have found someone I love more than anything else in the world, one of us has to die first more likely than not.

What happens to my life after they're gone? That's one of the most uncomfortable, upsetting, and haunting questions that I've ever wrestled with internally. When Kate and I got married, it's a question that became crystallized in my mind. I'll never have a good answer to it. I'll always be scared of the various answers to it, to the point that we talk all the time about — well not all the time, because we'd have a really fucked up life if we did it all the time. We talked a lot about is there any ideal order to that? Is it better that I die first or she dies first? These are the weird things we've discussed. It's too uncomfortable to look at. What else is horror? It's the things we're scared to look at. In this case, because we dealt in the first season with one of the other most horrific things I can imagine, just the death of a child, something else I can't even let into my imagination.

This time to talk about the death of someone you truly love. It took kind of the whole season's worth of work in on all of the episodes to crystallize that last couple of little paragraphs. They were always just meant to be if there's one point to the damn thing, it's that. The song, the Sheryl Crow song I've been obsessed with since I was in college. I saw it in this very little remembered movie called The Pallbearer with David Schwimmer and Gwyneth Paltrow. It plays over their last dance in that story and I don't know why that song's never left my head, but to go off of that last little speech into that particular song and let us carry it out to that last image of a hand on someone's shoulder that they don't know is there. That's the kind of stuff that makes me want to make these things. That's the thing that separates it for me from the somewhat unfair perception that horror gets, because that's the kind of stuff that makes me look at my wife a little differently and my kids a little differently.

What you've identified there is what was always the reason to make this season. I hope that it lands with people the way it landed with us in the room and in the way it clearly landed with Carla, who played that moment as only she could. I'm hoping it lands. Thank you for asking about it.

the-haunting-of-bly-manor-benjamin-evan-ainsworth
Image via Netflix

I wanted to ask one thing that I think stuck out most to me about Hill House and the ending of Hill House is when Nell kind of describes what the nature of the house is and she says, "No. It's not a heart. It's a stomach." I feel like Episode 8 of this season has kind of a similar moment in which Carla Gugino, the narrator describes the house as being essentially Viola’s gravity. It goes from being kind of like a stomach to gravity. Do you enjoy coming up with kind of the metaphysical interpretations of what a haunting even is, and do you anticipate it becoming even more challenging going forward as you get further on into The Haunting franchise coming up with new fresh interpretations of what a haunting is?

FLANAGAN: It's one of my favorite things about it. The thing about hauntings is that they defy explanation, because the more you try to explain them the more ridiculous they can sound. They also create rules for themselves that become problematic. Like if the ghost is there because they were murdered before their time and they wanted revenge, and now they're killing other people, why don't they get to be ghosts? Why don't all the campers in Crystal Lake also get to come back and kill everybody? Who gets to make the haunted videotape and who isn't allowed to make the haunted video tape? Those are the crazy rules that drive me a little nuts as a fan, and so coming up with some kind of explanation for why Bly Manor is the way that it is, but another house that's just as old up the street presumably isn't crawling with ghosts. That's really fun. It's one of those things where you either have to kind of dive face first into it and take whatever slings and arrows come your way or you have to avoid it entirely and just kind of say like, "Ghosts are because… Anyway, bye!" There are good reasons to do both depending on the story.

One of the things that's really fun at the beginning of each season is to answer the first question of, you know, the show's called The Haunting. We can't not talk about the haunting. Why? Why is it? Why is it here? Do we need to answer that? Do we not need to answer that? Is ambiguity scarier? Sometimes it really is. Are answers necessary? Sometimes they really aren't or is it a really cool opportunity to try to make a haunting makes sense? Which is like if you're writing a time travel story, you're going to hit a paradox that ruins everything. So you either have to ignore it or you have to try to make it make sense, and either one of those can work great, but for me, I love it. I love the chance to try to do it.

You're correct. I'm very rapidly running out of metaphors. I don't know if there will be any more seasons of this show or if there are, we aren't going to be like, “This is also a gravity well.” But also, a stomach, it's like the gallbladder of the house this time. I don't know. It'll be something we kick around a lot, but it is something that is really enjoyable, and at the moment anyway depending on how many other stories like this we end up telling, I think it's always, always fun to try to turn it on its head and to try to come up with a new way to look at why a haunting is just so that it isn't just a face under the bed, as scary as that is. That's a great question.

Even though the second season, you're obviously looking to make it its own thing, from either a personal or professional standpoint, is there something you each took away from the first season as kind of something to keep in your pocket to, if nothing else, to keep in mind going into the second?

MACY: I've got an easy one. We hadn't done TV before the first season of Haunting, which is why it's both near and dear to us and while you'll see us twitch at various points in this call as well, because it kind of took a lot out of us, but I like to think of that as we left a lot on the field and what we were trying to do, because we didn't know whether anybody was going to see the show or want to watch it, but what we were trying to do is make something that was different than other things on TV and that we were proud of and wanted to watch ourselves. We figured if we could do those two things, we would have won, even if the show wasn't a hit. That was a pretty positive experience. I mean we finished it and it's like if I played football, I imagine I would tell you it's like after a football game, but you're exhausted, but you're departing the field successfully. So we felt like that even before it came out.

I think that's the big thing. That's a big professional takeaway for me is like don't try to do the same thing, try to do something that you want to see, try to do something that's different, and just make it good. I think that's stuff we did that we would have been proud of regardless of whether it connected with an audience or not. I think that's what we're trying to keep doing with the other shows that you've seen announced and some other stuff we're cooking up too.

FLANAGAN: Yeah. I can't say it any better than that. I think that was it. Season 1, we had no expectations of it finding an audience. We had hopes for it, but there was nothing to indicate whether people would ever see it much less like it. The priority just became if this is the only thing you ever make in television, make it something that we're proud of and say something that's important to us and if nobody sees it, then we can always go back and be like, "Well, we did what we wanted anyway." I think you put it very well, Trevor. I think that followed us into this season quite a bit. I've also learned a lot about how it's really easy to type things like exterior lake on a piece of paper, but when you have to film in one at 3:00 in the morning in Vancouver that maybe you should think twice. There's a lot of fabulous lessons about that that are also carrying through from both seasons, but mostly just making something that we'd be proud of if no one saw it.

haunting-of-bly-manor-oliver-jackson-cohen
Image via Netflix

I wanted to touch upon the relationship between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. By the time the series wraps itself, we sort of feel a little bit bad for Peter Quint and we kind of feel for him. When developing more specifically his character, were you initially aiming to humanize him because he's always been more the abusive, mysterious type?

FLANAGAN: We were not aiming to humanize him. One of the things that was very exciting at the very beginning was Peter Quint was a straight-up villain. What was really fun about that was, "Oh, we're going to give it to Oliver. It's going to be really fun to watch Oli play just a bad, bad guy.” As the show evolved and especially as Oliver got into it, he had a lot of ideas about not… He under no circumstances ever wanted to make Peter a hero at all, but he said, "I think one of the things that's lacking in our discourse about good and bad people in our society is some sense of context." That we're all so capable of good and bad things that Oliver, I think, wanted it to be a little less cut and dry. There's also always a gravity in anything that we work on toward humanism, empathy, and forgiveness. Some characters, it's much easier to find that more than others, and initially, Peter struck me as difficult because he was endangering children. For us, at the very beginning, I don't know how you walk back from that, and then when we learn the circumstances of Rebecca's death, that Peter essentially embodies the ultimate lack of consent within that story.

I thought at that point there was nothing left to be done to pull him back from that, but Oliver proposed a number of different things specifically for Episode 7 in his conversations with his mother. They would come in these little flurries of emails late at night and it was one of those instances where an actor changed my mind about a character. He said, "I'm not excusing what he does. I will never excuse what he, the actions that he takes in the show, but I want to contextualize him, because so many of the people that do horrible things aren't just natural-born monsters. They're complicated human beings who come that way through a series of choices, bad luck, coincidence and in some cases a predisposition to that kind of behavior." But he wanted it to be more complex and I've never found myself regretting making characters more difficult to pin down. I've always found myself regretting making them simpler. In my mind and in Oliver's as well, Peter began the season as a clear-cut villain, and the fact that the context of him got more complicated by the end is really I think a testament to Oliver's take on the character and what was important to him.

It made it more interesting for me, and every time he'd send another idea and I'd say, "I just, I don't think we need it” or “it's changing the character for me," I always found his suggestions to be incredibly compelling. I've learned over the years to listen to my instincts with actors when it comes to that. It's led to some of the best collaborations I've had in my career.

MACY: We also, by the way prove that out in editorial, because we tried, especially in Episode 7, we tried on several different cuts for size and the ones that worked best including the final one were the ones where he has some shading as a human being rather than just kind of the mustache twirly guy. He was never really that, but it was that episode that gave him that shading.

FLANAGAN: It bore as well on Rebecca Jessel and Tahira [Sharif] would weigh in on it as well, because she said, "I feel like if he doesn't have more complexity to him, I feel like if he's just a villain…" She had a hard time understanding why her character would fall for him and that was a really important point that the tragedy of Rebecca Jessel hinged on the fact that she was a very, very intelligent young woman, and if Peter really was the slimeball that he is in the book and there wasn't anything else to him that she had a really hard time understanding why she would have fallen into his trap at all. In that case, it was the actors. The actors really, really both contributed to changing that up a little bit. I do hope it doesn't tip too far, because I do think he does things in this series that are completely unbelievable. But, yeah, I do enjoy the complication of it though.

Yeah. I didn't think it took too far so you're you are good.

FLANAGAN: Okay. Good. I hope so, but I'm going to text Oli when we get off here and be like, "Dude…" Yeah. I've been really lucky to develop with certain actors a much more collaborative relationship than is typical on things like this. That really started with Kate years ago, and then with Carla Gugino who also we trust each other so much that we'll make changes to scenes and characters and intentions and backstories together on set. We don't do that with everybody, but with Oliver, in this case, it really worked well I thought.

haunting-of-bly-manor-image-4
Image via Netflix

I was curious about the ambiguities in terms of Shirley Jackson's work and looking at Henry James' work and both of them are very open-ended and they're both stories that I think a lot of literary scholars have written about and analyzed in different ways. I was wondering if the ambiguities in Turn of the Screw felt different from you in terms of adapting it to Bly Manor than for Haunting of the Hill House, where was there a different approach to looking at what the story could mean?

FLANAGAN: I think both of those stories are perfect examples of how you can reasonably take the position that there's nothing supernatural happening in those books. I love that as a fan. That's a much harder position to take when you're trying to get a green light on a genre show from any studio. I would say we dealt with this with Oculus quite a bit too. At what point we had to commit, because there was a version of Oculus that I really wanted to just be, you never knew ever if the mirror was just a normal mirror or not. That's a different movie. It's a different way to approach things. I think it works so beautifully in these two books. I think that's what makes them classics. I think it's because they activate your imagination, they create the question, and then not answering it, it just forces you to keep grinding at it and keep grinding at it and you will never be able to resolve your experience with those stories. That's what makes them so haunting and that's awesome.

I don't think we have that freedom in this day and age to do it, especially in something that's meant to be consumed by a particularly huge audience. I don't know how to pitch a version to Netflix. Even internally, I don't even know how Trevor and I could kind of get through a version of it where we never know if there was a ghost or not. What I've tried to do is to allow for that ambiguity to still be present in the season, and to still leave some questions unanswered, even though we have to come down on the side of — in our world, there just have to be ghosts. I think what we've tried to do is make it so that a number of things could be ghosts. That we're careful whenever we show a real ghost, a ghost that in our mythology has its own identity, its own agenda. It would exist there regardless of whether it was observed by any of the other characters on the screen, right? That's what we'll call the real ghost. That for every one of those we show, we also show a ghost that only exists in the psyche of one character. In season one, it was Olivia who Hugh would see and interact with. That was a ghost entirely of his own creation. A ghost that only had a private audience of one. That was just a splinter of his own psyche.

In this season, it was Henry in our riff on The Jolly Corner. I think that ambiguity is so satisfying, and nothing would make me happier than to be able to sustain that through a full season of television and never resolve it, it would be so cool. I don't think they'll ever let us get away with that, and so once it's kind of clear that we have to commit to that, once it's clear that there's all sorts of psychologically and emotionally ambiguous and complicated thoughts, I want to get into a viewer's mind, and if the price of that is I have to promise them that there are ghosts to get them to come in the door, that's a promise I'm obliged and happy to make. Then, once they're in there we're going to totally blindside them with the monologue about mortality or love or something. They're going to be like, "I came for the ghosts." It'll be like, "Sucker." But I think someday, someday we might be able to pit something like that. But for now, we'd had to kind of plant our flag in a way that the source material did not have to and I'm a bit jealous of them for that.

The theme of this like ghost stories are timeless. They could be set at any time, any place, and especially the passage of time is important this season. Why the '80s?

FLANAGAN: I was a young child in the '80s. I was born in the late '70s. I have a lot of nostalgia for that period. There's something really fun for me about horror in the '80s. It's when I discovered the genre. It's way more dramatic from an aesthetic perspective when you talk about the amazing hair, clothing from the '90s or the aughts it's kind of like, "Ehhh." But you get into the '80s, and suddenly you're going to have a much more distinct identity to the music and to the hairstyles and to everything else. It's really fun to play and the actors love it, and perfectly selfishly, this is going to sound really lame, I love any time period that feels contemporary where I do not have to deal with cell phones from a writing perspective. Cell phones are the worst thing that ever happened to the genre from a writing perspective. Cell phones suck. Smartphones are the fucking worst, but the '90s put you into that zone where realistically you start getting those giant like football sized phones up in people's ears and that kind of just nullifies them for me from an aesthetic point of view, because the moment I have to have a character do that, I am violently knocking a huge percentage of the audience out of the experience of the show, just throwing water in their face, right?

The '80s is a little different, because I can get that feeling of a contemporary and relatable period that doesn't drift into the '60s and '70s so much, which starts to feel further and further away. The closer we get to the '60s the closer we are to the period of time in which Jack Clayton made The Innocents. It starts to get a little too far. I find it to be that sweet spot of relatable, aesthetically interesting, in this particular case, when we talked about what it meant to be navigating Dani's sexuality in England, in particular, the late '80s was a period of time where that was actually really not very straightforward and pretty dramatic, and so that served us as well. Yeah. Also, no phones.

the-haunting-of-bly-manor-oliver-jackson-cohen-social
Image via Netflix

I was wondering, because Mike, you mentioned, obviously, you have sort of that call back to Quint in the window, which I absolutely loved, but there's also some other really fun touches in this as well in terms of sort of the humming of Ola Olawale, which I thought was really nice. I also thought it was interesting that you sort of changed the name to Ms. Clayton. Can you talk about sort of tipping your hat a little bit to that film, in particular? Also, I love the fact that Dani was staying in room 217 at the hostel as well.

FLANAGAN: You picked up on that. Nice. Very subtle little nod there. Yeah I adore Jack Clayton's The Innocents. I love it. Their use of Ola Olawale, I can never say it right. That song used in that movie is so perfect and the way they play it over the credits and the way it kind of infects it, it's eerie on an incredible level. We started the writer's room for this. Our first day of the writer's room we went over to Amblin and we watched The Innocents in Steven Spielberg's theater. We did the same thing with Season 1 with Robert Wise's The Haunting. It's a great way to start. It's a really wonderful way to kind of put up a really beautifully realized adaptation of the same source material and to start talking to the writers about the things that I love about it and hear the things that they love about it. That was a movie I really wanted to celebrate, because it's a movie I think isn't talked about for whatever reason. It doesn't come up as often as The Haunting does though it employs a lot of the same technique and came out two years prior. It's one of those films that cinephiles love and horror fans love, but a lot of people don't know it. We were actively always looking for ways to kind of tip our hat to it. It was the same with Robert Wise in Season 1.

We didn't have the benefit of being able to bring Russ Hamlin in this time, though we went looking. Looking for anyone on the cast that we could find from The Innocents to see if we could get them back. It's the Easter Eggs and the little nerdy things and stuff that's not only because we're all horror fans, we're all movie fans and TV fans and it's the kind of stuff that makes us happy at work to put those in, but it's also a little communication to you guys and to other fans who love the same things we love. I think one of the coolest things about being people who love movies is that we get to share that with each other and there's these little unspoken secret languages we develop just being fans of the same thing. It's the fact that those of you that see 217 up there, you're going to laugh and you can look at each other, you don't need to say a word. We've created telepathy just based on our own shared love of something.

That's awesome and to contrast that with the other culture of fandom out there that really exists to try to identify something someone else likes, and to just shit on it as hard as they can. Twitter, for example, that type of fandom that builds its identity on confronting people for having the nerve to enjoy something, that's a toxic energy. It affects audiences and creators alike. We all see it and it hurts. Sometimes it makes you not want to put as much into things. However, the inverse of that is true and is really important and that's that we get to use the shared vocabulary that we've grown over the years as we've fallen in love with stories and movies and TV shows, and as we met other people who have carved out some swath of common ground with us that way, there are so many reasons for us in this culture right now to believe we have nothing in common with each other.

There's so many different ways for us to judge each other and to abuse each other, having any kind of little secret thing that we can share and that can bring people some kind of shared happiness, that to me is like what an Easter Egg is. It really is just the opposite of a dog whistle. It's a quiet and secret communication that's meant to just kind of awaken just a little moment of joy in people who see the same thing you see, like the same thing you like, and to invite other people into it, because other people who might not yet speak that language might see the joy that you have as you have a little exchange with someone that way. It may open them up to something and kind of fold them into it. They serve a lot of purposes I think. But it's some of the most fun we get to have. We'll talk about like, "Oh we're quoting this. Oh we're homaging this. Oh we want this frame to look like this. Oh it'd be great to name a character blank." It makes us laugh and smile and celebrate us dance. I think the minute we forget our fandom is the minute that the content we put out starts to get gross and stale and cynical and just start to feel disingenuous. I hope it works both ways. Sorry. That's a very ramble-y answer.

The Haunting of Bly Manor is out on Netflix now and you can click the link for all of our coverage.