A tale of love and loss: ‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’ uses the supernatural to tackle on the subjective
Season 2 of Netflix’s phenomenon ‘The Haunting’ proves that horror can also be introspective
One thing I’ve come to learn about ghosts is that, most of the times, they are not evil spectrums hiding in the corner of the room, neither lost souls weeping at the edge of your bed. Sometimes, the things that really haunt us are the things that never came to life at all. All the ‘what ifs’ that will never come to be. All the roads not traveled by. All the wrong choices and regrets. And, other times, the ghosts that haunt us the most are not even ours to begin with.
The Haunting of Bly Manor explores many types of haunting through its nine episodes, most of them not really relying on the supernatural as a source of horror, which was ever-present in its predecessor, ‘Hill House’. Sure, there are a lot more tangible ghosts, but the actual haunting comes not from what they become in the afterlife, but from what they used to be as living people. The catch in ‘Bly Manor’ is that it twists our basic notions of what a ghost is. Here, the main plot is not necessarily the dead coming to haunt the living, but mostly these very same dead being the ones who are constantly haunted by the echoes of the life they cannot go back to.
It got me thinking about the words of George R. R. Martin: “death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities”. Here, the ghosts are tortured by the endless possibilities of their lives that never came true. Rebecca and Peter never fled to America, Hannah and Owen never lived happily ever after in Paris. When we watch Rebecca desperately crying over her lifeless body, the horror we feel is not one born from fear or a scare; it’s the subjective realization that the actual ghost is not her dead self, but that living, breathing Rebecca that once came to Bly full of hopes and dreams.
That’s the major difference between ‘Hill House’ and ‘Bly Manor’. In the first, it didn’t really matter how the ghosts in the house came to be ghosts, because the main focus was on the living. In this one, the ghosts have a backstory, because they, too, are haunted souls. And, I dare say, the true protagonists. It reminds us that the stories of our dead deserve to be told, be it in sorrow, mourning or bittersweet nostalgic joy. And here comes to mind another saying, quoted in one of my favorite frames from Scorsese’s Shutter Island: “remember us, for we too have lived, loved and laughed”.
I think we are all haunted, in a way. We walk around carrying the ghosts of the people we once were and the choices we made and the things that happened to us. But while we’re alive, we can choose to let these ghosts behind us, just like Dani did. We can choose to move on. What stuck to me after watching ‘Bly Manor’ is that, in death, life becomes a ghost too. In fact, even our happiest memories can haunt us, reminding us of everything we can’t have anymore. It made me realize that ghosts are, in fact, echoes, bouncing on the walls of our memory — not solid, not concrete. Just an ethereal reminding of the things that we cannot possess anymore. Nothing remains. Time just washes it all away.
