‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’: Netflix Teases Fall Release Date in New Poster

The Haunting of Bly Manor is set for a Netflix release date this fall, but until then, the second season in the Haunting of Hill House anthology series advises fans to “look beneath the surface.” Sharing a first-look poster of the upcoming show, based on the 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, the show’s team confirmed showrunner Mike Flanagan’s general timeline of when fans can enter Bly Manor for the first time.

In 2019, Flanagan told The Wrap he expected Bly Manor to premiere in October 2020, following the same release pattern as Hill House, which was released in time for Halloween 2018. The Crain family’s story is over, Flanagan has been clear, with the anthology series moving on to the story of a young governess who is hired to nanny two children at an old country mansion in England. While Hill House dove deep into family trauma, Bly Manor is about broken hearts and tragic love, he told Vanity Fair Monday.

“It certainly provides a new way to tell a love story, and there are three of them really that beat at the heart of this season,” Flanagan said. “They all have a very dark edge to them. And by the end, it’s really hard to differentiate tragedy with romance. That sense of romantic longing for someone who meant so much to us—but who’s gone—really is the heart of any ghost story.”

“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 added. “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.”

Many of the Bly Manor actors will be Hill House alum, however, including Victoria Pedretti (playing governess Dani Clayton), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Peter Quint), Henry Thomas (Henry Wingrave) and Kate Siegel, whose role remains a secret. Bly Manor will also star Rahul Kohli, previously of iZombie, T’Nia Miller of Years and Years, Amelia Eve, Benjamin Ainsworth, and Amelie Smith.