The Haunting of Hill House season 2: Netflix reveals first look at Haunting of Bly Manor

Same actors return as new characters in fresh horror tale

Almost two years since The Haunting of Hill House arrived, Netflix has unveiled the first look at the follow-up season.

The horror show from Doctor Sleep director Mike Flanagan – an adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel – was released to acclaim in October 2018, and users swiftly became hooked on its twists and turns as much as its scares.

News on the new season has been sparse, but it was announced that the characters featured in Hill House would be ditched in favour of new ones altogether.

Much like Ryan Murphy’s anthology series American Horror Story, the majority of the cast will return playing new characters – this time for a series based on Henry James‘s 1898 chiller The Turn of the Screw.

Titled The Haunting of Bly Manor, the series will focus on a young woman who, after moving to the English countryside to look after two orphaned children, collides with unexplained entities.

Flanagan, who released first look photos of the series via Vanity Fair, revealed there were two other James works that inspired the new series: The Jolly Corner, which tells the story of a terrifying doppelgänger, and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, following two sisters and a chest of dresses.

Victoria Pedretti, who play Nell in Hill House, rakes the lead as the tutor who arrives at a stately manor to look after the Wingrave children.

Others to return include Henry Thomas, Kate Siegel and Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who will be playing a villain this time around.

Victoria Pedretti returns as a new character in ‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’ (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images) ((Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images))

Speaking about the new season, Flanagan said: “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.

“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.”

The Haunting of Bly Manor is expected to be available to stream on Netflix from October.