Imagine you sit down at a writing table and decide you’re going to create a television series based around a haunted house that also contains commentary on mental illness, grief, religion, generational trauma, alcoholism, and feminine queer experiences. Additionally, you decide to set this series in 1980s England and create a complex web of stories with intricate timelines and introduce a completely original idea about the loss of identity that ties into the overarching theme of ownership. If you’re thinking to yourself: “Wow, this seems insane and complicated and I can never imagine coming up with such a thing”, then you, my good friend, are not THE Mike Flanagan.
Flanagan has come to be recognized for his beautifully crafted ways of storytelling in the horror drama genre, with works including The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Haunting of Hill House, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Midnight Mass. It's kind of crazy that this guy keeps bringing up these houses and honestly, for my own well-being, I wish he would leave them alone. The first Flanagan series I ever saw was The Haunting of Bly Manor in 2022 shortly after its release, and perhaps it’s due to it being my first, but I believe it will always be my absolute favorite. Like previously mentioned, this series was truly a feat of a thousand ideas coming together to create a beautiful melody of stories, spanning from the pain of grief to the sublimity of individual queer acceptance. It is one of those series that never lose their place in your memories, and truly make you gain a new appreciation for the art of television and its ability to immerse you into someone else’s narrational perspective. There’s something so profoundly human about storytelling, and this show reminds me why I love it so much. What follows is my love letter to Bly Manor; a place so morbidly full of life and a place where I feel I can always tuck away in my mind.
The Great, Good Place
The great, good place— the keeper of a million secrets, and the resting place for generations of souls. Bly Manor is not only the setting for Mike Flanagan’s story, it is the main character in a story overflowing with heartache. This is a common trope of Flanagan’s, to anthropomorphize these homes into living vessels and not only have them be the stage for the events of the series, but the heart at which the main stories lie. This is especially significant to the viewers, or maybe just especially significant to me, because we all have a home; whether it be the one that we currently reside in or one that has long past and now only lives in our memory, we all have a place that we consider to be a place of refuge, and sometimes these places may feel like they trap our sorrow into them as we breathe inside their walls. Like each exhale releases all of our negativity, only to be sucked up by the wallpaper and then burrow into the pipes of the place that is meant to signify safety. This is what Flanagan does so well— he takes something that is so wound up into every human’s nature and then makes us afraid of it.
Dani, the Wingrave’s new au pair, is introduced to Bly Manor by the estate “yawning to welcome her”, and in the night the house seems to “take a deep breath and hold it until morning” (rough quotes based on my memory but I think I’m pretty close). The house is not just a vessel. It is not just wood panels, cement, and labor; it lives alongside those who inhabit it. In episode 8, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”, it is revealed that Bly Manor’s haunted nature comes from the spirit of one woman who was so strong-willed and stubborn, she refused to truly die. She had boiled with anger and frustration throughout so much of her life, and was not ready to give up her autonomy to a disease of which she had no control over. During her last days, she was no longer able to visit her daughter, who she had tried with all her might to infuse her own strength into from birth. She watched idly while her younger sister and husband raised her own child together, and was trapped inside the confines of her room due to her illness. Her stubbornness in life became her restlessness in death, and her spirit would walk Bly Manor for all eternity until someone came along to unlock the key to setting her soul free.
I’ll Feel it for the Both of Us
It is told that the two children that Dani Clayton would be minding as an au pair had suffered a great deal of hardship during their young lives. Miles and Flora Wingrave had lost both of their parents during a trip overseas, and had lost their previous au pair to “suicide” (more on that later). On top of it all, their home had never been a place of safety for them as the heartbroken Viola walked the steps of Bly every night hoping to retrieve the things that she had lost, leaving an army of souls to follow in her footsteps and forever roam Bly Manor. Dani knew she was walking into a home that had felt enough despair to fill the universe, but what she did not know was that she would meet the same fate as those poor souls that had been stolen by Viola— a much worse fate, in fact. Although, something else that was not aware to the au pair was that she would also meet the first person in her whole life that would attempt to save her from drowning in that lake of sorrow.
Jamie Taylor, a sarcastic and crass gardener, did not even introduce herself to Dani, although Dani apparently did not feel that an introduction was necessary, since she felt like she already fully knew the gardener upon her first glance upon her. Dani had experienced a trauma in her past— the death of her fiancé, who was enraged when Dani explained that she did not feel as though she could go through with the marriage. As soon as Dani meets Jamie, it is clear to the audience why that marriage would have never worked.