As with Hill House, Flanagan and producing partner Trevor Macy worked together to update the setting and expand and adapt the original text. They also wove in aspects of other supernatural stories by James, including "The Jolly Corner," about a menacing doppelgänger, and "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," about two sisters and a mysterious chest of beloved dresses.
"The process is the same, in that it's a literary remix," Macy said. "You want to update the story, you want to find whatever fertile ground for elevating the character that you can in the source material, but we obviously took some liberties in updating it with a more modern setting."
Some of the cast of Hill House has returned, but they're each playing different parts this time. Bly Manor takes place mostly in 1987, starring Victoria Pedretti, the doomed sister Nell of Hill House, now playing the sunny American tutor Dani Clayton, who hopes to escape her own painful past by taking a job at the stately mansion looking after the Wingrave children—volatile Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, 11) and cheerful Flora (Amelie Bea Smith, 9).
"Victoria and I talked at the very beginning about how to differentiate this character from Nell. Nell was a character that carried around a ton of darkness with her and never quite got out of the shadows that she was introduced in when we see her as a child," Flanagan said. "Between the setting in the '80s, and this idea of a young American abroad, just out on an adventure, it brightened everything up to begin with."
That's just the veneer, of course. A creeping shadow gradually spreads over Bly Manor and its inhabitants.
"At its foundation, the Haunting series is very much about haunted spaces and haunted people. The way we make those things dance together is really going to be what's uniform about Hill House and Bly," Flanagan said. "Outside of that though, it was really important for all of us not to play the same notes we played for the first season. The first season is very much entrenched in family dynamics and death and grief and loss and child trauma. We all collectively felt like we'd said everything we wanted to say about that."
