World News – UA – The real villain on « Haunting of Bly Manor » is the act of forgetting

Though he has mostly worked in the horror genre for the past nine years, TV screenwriter Mike Flanagan has made a career out of making heartfelt and emotional stories that sink their claws into our deepest fears His latest work, The Haunting of Bly Manor, looks a lot like a continuation of the themes and tone of the first season of his anthology, The Haunting of Hill House Both deal with broken families and ghosts that represent trauma, but there is an important change that sets Bly Manor apart from its predecessor.Instead of focusing on ghosts that perfectly mirrored deceased loved ones, Bly Manor presents us with ghosts. faceless devoid of identity

At first, the appearance of these ghosts serves to make them more frightening to the characters and the audience.After all, a completely faceless being is more terrifying than seeing an ordinary person, even if that person is dead. And yet, as with Hill House, the ghosts of Bly Manor are its most tragic characters.They seem creepy at first, but we slowly discover that they are victims of senseless violence brought about in part by the act of forgetting and to be forgotten

The Haunting of Bly Manor follows the story of a housekeeper hired to look after two orphaned children in a giant mansion in the English countryside.The housekeeper takes the job in part because she wants to help the children and gone to escape her own ghost – the specter of her recently deceased fiancé Inside the mansion, she realizes that she’s not the only one seeing ghosts Whether it’s the two children seeing their previous housekeeper and her boyfriend, or the housekeeper slowly realizing that she herself is a ghost in other people’s lives, everyone in Bly is haunted by memories of loved ones who are now gone

Episode 5, « The Altar of the Dead » begins with the cook, Owen, talking about the fact that he just lost his mother to dementia. « We can’t trust the past » , he said, referring to the crippling fear that one day everything that makes you who you are, your memories and who you are, will fade into oblivion. Indeed, if trauma and grief were the major themes of Hill House, then Bly Manor is all about memories. The series often relies on flashbacks to tell its story, going back in time to explore the backstory of several of its characters, and we often see the same characters walking away in the middle of a conversation, as they are trapped in their own memories

The show draws a direct parallel between this addiction to memories, for comfort and identity, and the ghosts that haunt the grounds Unlike the ghosts that roam the lands of Hill House decades after the deaths of loved ones , those who die in Bly Manor slowly see themselves disappear as they are forgotten by everyone, until they lose every piece of their old self It shares a thematic space with the Pixar movie Coco, which is steeped in Mexican lore and argues that a person dies three times: once when their body stops functioning, once when they are buried, and once when they are buried. no one remains alive to remember their

It’s not entirely different from Owen’s mom dying of dementia The Haunting of Bly Manor portrays memories as the bearer of our very essence, our identities and the loss of that is what really kills one person in the horror genre, Natalie Erika James’ earlier-year movie Relic strikes a similar balance between scares and emotional benefits Like Bly Manor, Relic uses the haunted house genre to tell a terrifying story which also touches on dementia In this film, a woman comes home to care for her elderly mother, but slowly begins to realize that the house – just like her mother’s spirit – is fading What makes Relic creepy is the realization that this is not some extravagant fiction, but something that you will probably experience yourself It was not enough to see the characters go through the horrors of the film, I left the theater feeling paralyzing terror that accompanies agne knowing that I will probably go through the same struggles with my own mother someday In Bly Manor the characters most afraid of ghosts are those who understand this and know that they themselves will become ghosts over time. , because their memories are forgotten

Take the example of Viola, the heiress of Bly Manor who fell ill at a young age. In Episode 8, adapted from Henry James’ short story « The Romance of Certain Old Clothes », we see how Viola continued to « live » long after succumbing to tuberculosis In death she would relieve some parts of her routine in purgatory She lost a bit of herself which is to be expected since she has already suffered her first two deaths, that of the body and that of being buried But it is when her husband and daughter decide to throw away their memories of Viola – her trunk full of clothes and other precious objects – that Viola undergoes « absolute abandonment », as the narrator of the show points out. This leads him to become the first of the faceless ghosts in the house, for, as the narrator explains, « everything fades The flesh Calculation Even the stars themselves, » as the memories fade away  » , the spirit too « 

Where Hill House explores the horrors of heartbreak and trauma and uses its ghosts to represent that, just as The Haunting of Bly Manor uses its ghosts to represent a fear deep within us The fear that eventually you will forget all of those who are important to you and they will forget you

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The Haunting of Hill House, Netflix