The first full trailer for the upcoming Netflix original series The Haunting of Bly Manor dropped a few days ago. I’m a big fan of Mike Flanagan, with both the 2019 film Doctor Sleep being one of my favourites of last year, and the 2018 series The Haunting of Hill House being one of my favourite series of that year.

Bly Manor is the second in what officially appears to be an anthology series, with the same production crew and many of the same actors, but a self-contained story with new characters. Based on the 1898 Henry James story The Turning of the Screw, this series will hopefully be creepy another great entry in Mike Flanagans incredibly effective horror filmography.

So let’s take a closer look!

Note: due to the number of images in this post, it has been broken up into THREE pages. You will find navigation buttons at the bottom of each page.

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Starting right away with a young child looking out over a pond, and looking up from her dollhouse to a door. There’s a weird soft filter on these shots which makes me wonder if this is some kind of dream sequence. Either way, it’s incredible how just zooming in on a door from a low angle can make it seem creepy as hell.

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“Now let’s come up with a story,” says Amelie Smith as Flora Wingrave. Surely that will end well. I hope that the kids’ intros end up being good because kids can end up making or breaking a scary movie or show. Flanagan has had great success with this recently, so I am not too worried, though.

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I must confess that I haven’t read The Turning of the Screw, all I know is that a widower hires a governess to watch over his children. This version of the story is obviously updated to the 1980s instead of taking place in the late 19th century as the original does, but that’s basically all I want to know. This is definitely an “I might read the book after I see this” situation.

Either way, that’s Hill House veteran Victoria Pedretti as the governess in question.

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“Your parents loved you so, so much. In a way they’ll always be here.” I shall place one shiny loonie on “as ghosts”, please.

There’s no way to tell if that image of the bloody hand and the image of the Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Miles are connected but they sure work well together in the trailer.

I just really love this staircase. Every haunted house needs to have an amazing staircase.

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Here’s our first look at T’Nia Miller as Hannah Grose, as well as our first look at the character of the house. The crack in the wall is an ominous sign of how the place is (most likely) run down, and I hope the house is as much a character in the series as it was in Hill House.

I don’t know about you, team, but I am starting to think that the pond is going to be a major plot point in the series. Just a hunch, here.

See what I mean about the awesome creepy staircase? Every haunted house needs one that you can shoot with weird camera angles to accentuate the creepiness of the set.

This is our first look at Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Peter Quint. He looks like he might have seen some stuff.

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Here’s another shot of Miles, looking off camera to something that has him freaked out. I can’t tell but I am assuming the person grasping the door menacingly is his father, Henry Wingrave as played by Henry Thomas, but they’re obscured enough that I cannot say for sure.

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Here’s our first look at Rahul Kohl’s excellent moustache and another shot of T’Nia Miller.

The line goes by pretty quickly, but she says “I know it sounds strange, but I’m having somebody else’s dream.” Honestly, that sounds…. violating to me. I wonder if she is this seasons resident psychic. Every good haunted house story needs a psychic.