Not A Review Of “The Haunting of Bly Manor”

So for a while, we had canceled our Netflix subscription, because we were watching a lot of stuff on other services and Netflix didn’t have anything going that I really wanted to watch. (I know, I know, everyone loves Squid Game, but that doesn’t interest me, and the reality show version of it interests me even less.) I finally decided to resubscribe because I wanted to watch Mike Flanagan’s new horror series The Fall of the House of Usher, which is, essentially, an anthology based on Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, novels, and poems. I almost convinced my wife to watch this one, on the basis of the fact that the Mike Flanagan shows I’ve seen on Netflix have been spooky but not gory, and my wife is known to enjoy the spooky creepy stuff on occasion (in fact, she is currently reading The Little Stranger); but then I heard from several friends that House of Usher was, in fact, quite gory, and, yeah, you can kind of see that in the trailer:

So that was a no-go for her. Anyway, after finishing up House of Usher, I worked backwords to one of Flanagan’s previous series, The Haunting of Bly Manor:

This one is, in fact, not gory. However, when I showed it to my wife, it happened to be when we were being introduced to the creepy dollhouse owned and operated by a perfectly splendid little girl named Flora. I couldn’t find a clip of the dollhouse, but I did find stills of some of the dolls inside which represent some of the many, many (many!) ghosts that haunt Bly Manor:

Wife: “Nope.”
Me: “But it’s not gory. It’s creepy. You like creepy things sometimes.”
Wife: “I have a limit.”

So apparently creepy dollhouses filled with creepy dolls are a no-go. Oh, speaking of no-gos, I may have forgotten to mention …

Have all you spoiler-averse folks who haven’t seen The Haunting of Bly Manor yet moved on to something else? You have? Okay, good. So as I was about to say, I did subject my wife to what was by far the most disturbing scene in Bly Manor, in which the character Peter—who is by no means a good person, but isn’t nearly as bad as he’s going to get after being murdered by a ghost and becoming one himself, possibly going mad in the process—is caught in the path of the house’s most lethal ghost, the Lady in the Lake. (This ghost would be the one represented by the faceless mannequin being held by a hand in the extreme bottom right-hand corner of the last picture of the dolls.)

Wife: “That’s a very strong ghost.”

Now, it is the case that, back before The Event when I routinely used to have those extremely vivid fun dreams, I would, occasionally, have dreams about being menaced by ghosts. A lot of times these dreams would end up with me literally whimpering in my sleep, because what can you do about ghosts?* Usually when that would happen I would disturb my wife and then she would have to shake me awake (I’m hard to wake up when I’m sleeping) and she would be like:

Wife: “Dreamin’ about ghosts again, huh?”

This is exactly the sort of scene that seems like it would facilitate such nightmares (or, as I apparently used to call them when I was little, “night-merrors”), but I figured, correctly, that these days, that was unlikely to happen.

Me: “Isn’t she spooky? She reminds me of the ghosts I used to take pictures of in Fatal Frame. I probably don’t have to worry about having a nightmare about her though.”
Wife: “Well that’s one benefit I guess.”

Incidentally, I mentioned earlier that my wife was reading The Little Stranger, a ghost** story by Sarah Waters, who is possibly best-known for lesbian-themed fiction like Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith***, a fact of which my wife is aware, since she’s read several Sarah Waters novels. After getting into The Little Stranger a bit, she had a question.

Wife: “Is Caroline gay in this book?”
Me: “Umm, there aren’t any lesbians in that ghost story. Bly Manor has them, though.”

* Aside from calling the … Well, you know who you’re gonna call.
** Maaaaybe.
*** So far I’ve read The Little Stranger and Fingersmith. Both of them were good. Fingersmith was better.