'The Haunting Of Bly Manor' Posters Tease Terrors To Come
The Haunting of Bly Manor will arrive next Friday in all its ghostly glory. And ahead of that impending release, stylish posters for each episode have been released. They're vague but suggestive, and will all make much more sense once you see the episodes in question. For now, though, you can gaze upon their glory below and try to decipher their meaning. And, as a fun bonus, each episode is named after a Henry James story. James' The Turn of the Screw serves as the main inspiration for this season.The Haunting of Bly Manor is an adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, but it's also borrowing ideas from several other stories by James. And this first poster gets right to it, revealing that episode 1 is called "The Great Good Place," which is also the title of a story James wrote about "a harried writer who dreams of escaping to a place where he can rest and recover before returning to the grind of his overloaded life."
And here's another James story being used as an episode title. James' "The Pupil" focuses on "a precocious young boy growing up in a mendacious and dishonorable family."
"The Two Faces" is a James story about characters gathering an English country house and estate for a weekend party. Sensing a theme here? Yes, that's right – every episode is named after a Henry James story. It's worth noting that this doesn't mean the episodes themselves are straight adaptations of these particular stories. But it doesn't not mean that, either. Cue the spooky music.
James' "The Way It Came" follows an "unnamed female narrator recounts her obsession with the mystical coincidence of two friends who seem destined to meet and who apparently do unite in spirit after death."
"The Alter of the Dead" was a James story about a man trying to always remember his dead friends and never let their memories slip away.
James' "The Jolly Corner" follows a man visiting the house he grew up in and finds it to be haunted by his own alter ego.
Episode 7 is the second part of "The Two Faces," and it's particularly interesting that this two-parter doesn't come back-to-back. You have to wait a few episodes before you get here.
Here's a mysterious entry where the title has been erased. However, through careful research (and by careful research, I mean citing this interview with Bly Manor showrunner Mike Flanagan), I've discovered that one of the James stories serving as inspiration for this season is "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," which – in true Wheel of Fortune fashion – fits the number of blank spaces above. In James' story, two sisters both fall in love with the same man.
Finally, the season finale is called "The Beast in the Jungle," which was a James tale about a character "who believes he is destined for a special fate."
In The Haunting of Bly Manor, "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."