Written by contributor Daphne Asir
The Haunting of Bly Manor is the highly anticipated second season in the anthology series, The Haunting of Hill House. The new season began production on September 30th 2019, and according to Mike Flanagan, wrapped on February 21st 2020. With almost half the year gone, we’ll probably be hearing about this from Netflix pretty soon hopefully!
So now is the time to brush up on the first season of Haunting of Hill House, even though the second season is a standalone, especially since it was pure perfection.
The horror drama was created and directed by Mike Flanagan with it loosely based on the horror novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson. The story follows Hugh and Olivia Crain and their five children as they move into the Hill House.
The Crains Arrive At Hill House
The Crains arrive at Hill House hoping to fix it up and sell it, but things don’t go exactly as planned. They are stuck there longer than expected and the family is subjected to the hauntings. And well……it screws them up. It affects Olivia Crain the most and she ends up having migraines, hallucinations, and visions. She’s also driven mad with fear of the ‘outside world eating her children’ and ‘being stuck in a horrible, horrible dream’, thanks to one of the resident ghosts in the house, Poppy Hill. And the only way to wake up is to kill them!
The children deal with their own set of messed up things as the house basically feeds on their fears.
“All those colours. They’re all gone now, Hugh. And there’s only one left. I’m scared. That’s all I am. There’s nothing left. I’m only scared.” – Olivia to Hugh
Steven, being the eldest, takes up the role of taking care of the younger ones, which is a bit too much for him as he’s a kid himself. He also tries to cheer up his mother, who had been acting a little ‘scattered’ lately, by fixing up a dresser only to have his mother shatter the glass.
Shirley, the second child, takes pictures of everything around, trying to capture the good moments, but as fate would have it, she comes across some very sick kittens and ends up taking care of them. They all end up dying on her watch, except for one…good news? Not really. It ends up having very creepy rolled-back eyes. Oh and also, when she’s about to bury it, it starts moving except a bug crawls out of its mouth, freaking Shirley out. You get the picture, it was bad, we’ll just stop here.
Theo, the middle child, has a gift. She is ‘sensitive’, but not in the traditional sense. She can sense things just by touching them, which she puts to good use later on in life. But as a kid, she ends up seeing her mother bloodied and rotting and screams for her to getaway. Talk about the worst present ever.
Luke is haunted by a tall man in a hat (he’s also batshit crazy but kind of perfect for Poppy Hill if you think about it) and also a girl in the woods named Abigail, although he’s friends with her and she isn’t exactly dead at least not then.
Nellie, the youngest of the five children, and Luke’s twin is one of the most affected. She is haunted by the ‘bent neck lady’ who ends up terrifying her at every turn. And follows her well into her adult life.
The Last Fateful Night At Hill House
As Olivia becomes increasingly disturbed, Hugh and Olivia decide that she should spend a few days with her sister. But Olivia is terrified for her children’s welfare and convinced that they would be safer if they all died and were inside Hill House, so she goes back to the house at night and mixes rat poison in tea and invites the twins along with Abigail for a surprise tea party. (Yes, Abigail’s real and the daughter of the house’s caretakers). But fortunately, Shirley wakes up her father and Hugh, realising what was going on, races to the Red Room, which was previously closed and refused to open despite the family’s efforts.
He arrives just as she is serving tea, but he is too late to save Abigail. He grabs the twins and races out of there pushing Olivia in the process causing her to hit her head. He gets the kids out of the houses and drives away. Olivia in a daze, distraught, and disoriented falls down the stairs with a little help from Poppy Hill and ends up dead, forever stuck in the house. The house had successfully claimed one life, but things aren’t over yet.
The Present-Day Family Drama
Steven is a celebrated author of the Haunting of Hill House, which he based on the family’s experience at Hill House, except he doesn’t believe in ghosts. Adding to this is the fact the siblings and especially their mother doesn’t come out looking very good, so we can expect a little family drama alright! But can you blame them? No one, the kids included, knew what happened at Hill House, especially the last night. Growing up with lies and secrets couldn’t have been easy.
Shirley refuses to take his money calling it ‘blood money’, but her husband does, behind her back, and so do the rest of the siblings.
Shirley now owns a funeral home and has a family with two kids. She embodies anger, the second stage of grief, while Steven portrays the first, denial. So much so that he believes all the talk of ghost is because of a mental illness that runs in his family and gets a vasectomy. Even worse, he lies to his wife about it and when she does find out, they get separated.
Theo portrays bargaining and she is now a successful child psychologist who uses her ‘gift’ in her job. She also drinks to cope and has a kind of weird (but a good weird) relationship with Trish (initially a drunken one-night stand).
Luke becomes a drug addict, in and out of rehab, in line with Olivia’s fear (dealing with depression, the fourth stage of grief).
Nellie experiences sleep paralysis, still haunted by the bent neck lady, but things get better….at least for a little while. She meets a sleep therapist and inadvertently asks him out for coffee, and she ends up marrying him. But disaster strikes again and he dies before her eyes while she is in the middle of an episode of sleep paralysis, which further deteriorates Nellie’s mental health bringing back the bent neck lady.
The House Lures Nellie Back Into Its Depths
Nellie becomes so disturbed that she actually goes back to Hill House, which Hugh had locked up and refused to sell. She sees the lights flashing, an invitation for her to come inside used previously by their mother, flashing the porch lights to get the kids to come back inside.
Once in the House, she dances with Arthur except he isn’t there so she’s dancing by herself caught up in an illusion. Her mother, now a ghost at Hill House, gives her a rope which she accepts thinking it was the necklace her mother promised her years ago and puts it on. She comes back to herself, breaking out of the delusion, but it’s too late because Olivia pushes her down the stairs and she dies. The rope breaks her neck, becoming the bent neck lady going back in time, simultaneously to all the places and haunting her younger self. Yes, the series is that good and that heartbreaking.
Back In Hill House Again
The rest of the family unite for the funeral after which Luke goes back to Hill House to burn it, but the House refuses to catch fire.
Luke is attacked by the ghosts in Hill House and ends up with a needle in his arm, almost overdosing. The rest of them driven by guilt over not helping Nellie drive back to the house to save Luke. They face their fear and guilt caught in delusions until Nellie saves them all. The house fails to corrupt her or destroy her love for her family and she is still Nellie. But they are held hostage by Olivia and the ghosts until Hugh offers to stay in their place.
The Crain Siblings Now
Despite all this, the family actually have a happy ending, Luke is two years sober and the whole family, Steve and his wife, Theo and Trish, Shirley and her husband, all come together to celebrate it and the series reaches a perfect, satisfying, conclusion.
Now For Some of the Finer Points
While the series does leave some things to the imagination, here are some things we do know:
The Red Room: Nellie explains that the Red Room which they couldn’t open at all when they were kids, was the ‘stomach of the house’, which changed its form according to who was trying to open it, to ‘digest’ them.
“Mom says that a house is like a body. And every house has eyes and bones and skin. A face. This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart, a stomach.” – Nell
The Story of Poppy and William Hill: Poppy Hill was wife to William Hill, who was clinically insane. William Hill met Poppy in a mental institution, they fell in love and got married. Match made in heaven? Maybe not. After being driven more insane by the house, William bricks himself in a wall and dies there. They have a wheelchair-bound son who bangs on the walls because he can’t talk. And yes, they lose both their children to death. Talk about bad fortune.
Besides them, the house had several other ghosts. Hill House had quite an appetite after all!
Enjoyed the summary and the finer points which I missed while watching. Wish you’d replace the gifs with still pictures. It’s very distracting.