'The Haunting Of Hill House' Season 2 Will Adapt 'The Turn Of The Screw'
Netflix wants to stay in the Mike Flanagan business, so they've decided to forge ahead with The Haunting of Hill House season 2. Rather than a traditional second season, though, the show is now being turned into an anthology series called The Haunting. The new season will feature a new tale of terror, and new characters. The Haunting teaser below invites you to try to guess just where this is taking place (hint: it involves a Henry James novel).
A new Haunting is coming. Can you guess where it takes place? Listen closely... pic.twitter.com/vqzrd3z4NZ
— Midnight Mass (@midnightmass) February 21, 2019
The second season of The Haunting of Hill House is coming, and it's moving from Shirley Jackson to Henry James – adapting the classic gothic novel The Turn of the Screw. While this trailer deliberately blurs out the official title, you can catch a whispered quote within the video – "empty with a great emptiness." That quote is directly from The Turn of the Screw.
The title of the new season will be The Haunting of Bly Manor – Bly Manor being the location of James' novel. This is the first step towards turning the series into an anthology show, with subsequent seasons telling a new scary story, developed by Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy.
James' novel tells the tale of a governess who is hired to watch over two orphans residing in a huge, spooky mansion. The governess begins to suspect that the house is haunted, and that the children in her care can see the ghosts. But are the ghosts really there, or is she just going insane? James' tale has been adapted to the screen before, most notably the terrifying classic film The Innocents. That said, Hill House took great liberties with its source material, so I'm assuming Bly House will do the same.
"Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy are masterful at creating authentically frightening stories that leave audiences on the edge of their seats, but unable to look away," said Cindy Holland, Vice President, Original Content at Netflix. "We're excited to continue our partnership with them on The Haunting series and future projects to come."
Flanagan and Macy added: "Netflix has been an important part of our story, and we're proud to have worked with them on The Haunting of Hill House, not to mention Gerald's Game, Hush, and Before I Wake...They've enabled and supported a great deal of our work and we look forward to much more."
I was a huge fan of The Haunting of Hill House, finding it an incredible blend of horror and emotional drama. If Flanagan and company can bring that same energy to Bly House and all the future Haunting seasons, I'll be thrilled. But we'll have to wait until 2020 to see how things turn out.