Interviews
“The Haunting of Bly Manor”: Unlocking Secrets and Finding Hidden Ghosts with Mike Flanagan
Note: This article will contain major spoilers for “The Haunting of Bly Manor.”
“No matter how many ghosts there are hidden in the season, even if you find them all, we’re going to tell you there’s two more,” filmmaker Mike Flanagan jokes in a roundtable discussion for Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor. The hidden ghosts in The Haunting of Hill House, he explains, were meant to add to the spookiness and increase the rewatchability, but spotting them quickly became popular among viewers. While the hidden ghosts make their return this season, they’re handled a little differently.
Flanagan explains, “For Bly, it was important to find a way that the ghosts could actually be part of the narrative this time instead of so many random faces.” This season, the hidden ghosts recur and dovetail into the central storyline, and the biggest key to finding them is in Flora’s dollhouse.
Halfway through the first episode, “The Great Good Place,” Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) tucks Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) into bed, then walks through the connecting bathroom to do the same for his younger sister, Flora (Amelie Bea Smith). Lurking behind the door is a ghost that will reappear throughout the season – the plague doctor. Interestingly, this is reflected in Flora’s dollhouse, made in Bly Manor’s image. Flora walks a doll resembling Dani through the bathroom, and lurking behind her is a doll near identical to the plague doctor’s ghost.
The rest of this little scene within Flora’s dollhouse gives away much of the season, in terms of spirits. Not just how many ghosts there are, but where you can most commonly spot them.
Dani-doll with lurking plague doctor doll in the background.
With the Dani-doll now in Flora’s room, another doll silently observes in the background. There’s no context for it in this episode, but over the 9-episode season, it becomes clear that this doll is the stand-in for former au pair Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif). Jessel’s tragic love doomed her to roam Bly’s halls as a ghost, and she mostly sticks close to Flora for reasons that reveal themselves later. The camera shifts through Flora’s dollhouse, giving us a layout of the haunts inhabiting the home.
In Miles’s room, his doll shows him asleep in bed, while a Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) doll watches over him. It cuts to new spaces that show the little boy ghost with the doll face, the soldier that stands guard at the base of the stairs, and another that prefers the kitchen hearth. More tellingly, it teases Perdita (Catherine Parker), the ghost of the woman that shares a large bulk of the blame for Bly’s haunting- the full scope of which plays out in episode eight.
Soldier ghost
Doll faced ghost
Perdita the attic ghost
Hannah Grose doll
Then, curiously, the camera pauses on the doll counterpart to Hannah Grose (T’Nia Miller). It’s the first overt sign that the cheerful housekeeper isn’t among the living. Over the first few episodes, eagle-eyed viewers will notice that Hannah seems to not need to eat or drink, nor does she seem ever to sleep. Then there’s the pesky crack that keeps reappearing in various places, confusing Hannah. In episode five, Hannah learns a harsh truth; mere moments before Dani’s arrival, Peter possessed Miles and shoved Hannah down the well to her death.
Lastly, Dani finds a creepy doll tucked away underneath Flora’s dresser, far removed from the dollhouse. Its face devoid of any features. Flora’s immediately on edge when Dani picks it up from the floor. This doll is the Lady of the Lake. This ghost is the cause behind the hauntings and dwells at the bottom of the estate’s lake. She slumbers there, occasionally waking and wandering the house late at night. Those caught in her path perish. Flora relies on the dollhouse to keep an eye out for her, pleading for her new au pair to stay in her room until dawn.
Flanagan and the directors he assembled made it much harder to find all the hidden ghosts this season. Flanagan says, “This year, it was a lot more surgical. Some of them are written into drafts where they would be, especially the plague doctor and the doll face ghost in particular. But then it was just the usual thing on the set of trying to figure out if a ghost was too visible or too obvious. We made them a little harder to find in some cases, but I hope you guys enjoy them. I hope they pop out.”
One of the major changes to the ghost rules this season, outside of the approach to hiding them, was the introduction of memory or dream skipping. Flanagan breaks down why these ghosts struggle with memories: “Our idea was that the experience of being a ghost was something we really could really dig into this season. If you die on the grounds of Bly Manor, the first thing that happens is you go through a period of intense denial, and that’s where we have Hannah. We tried to illustrate it with Peter Quint when he’s first killed in the fifth episode, where you see him come out, and he doesn’t remember what happened. He picks up the doll and, as he stares at it in his hand and starts to remember, it falls through. So, the idea was that this first stage of it was this dreamed life that people could still carry on.
“They could dream up new clothes for themselves, which Hannah does, why she keeps changing her outfit scene to scene, and physically interact with the world. But once you accept the fact that you’re dead, a whole bunch of the rules immediately change; once that realization kicks in, you’re no longer able to reliably affect the world physically. And at that point, it becomes very non-linear. You’re involuntarily bouncing back and forth between what is the present, what is the past, what is the future. They aren’t like dominoes. Once you’re on the other side of death, your entire life falls around you like rain or like confetti.
“Dream hopping is bouncing back between those moments playing the part as you remember them. What was fun to play with here was the idea of the decay of memory. They say we each die twice; we die when our body ceases to be, and then we die when we’re forgotten. The idea that a ghost is subject to that deterioration that as their own memories fade, and people’s memories of them fade, the ghost physically fades. All this stuff goes away, but their memories become less and less reliable. That’s what Hannah is going through the entire time. She’s trying to hold onto some semblance of linear existence.”
As for that devastating ending, there’s a sentimental silver lining. This season’s narrator turns out to be an aged Jamie – played by Carla Gugino in the present and Amelia Eve in the past- who leaves the door ajar every night in the hopes of Dani’s ghostly return. The closing shot shows Dani’s hand on Jamie’s shoulder, though her lover is unaware.
Flanagan breaks this down: “The bracketed imagery of starting with Jamie asleep on the chair and in the pilot, it was meant to be the very first shot you ever saw was over Carla’s shoulder. We were going to end the series on the same shot, but there would be a hand there. That was one of the very first things that was pitched for it. I’m a bit of a sack with this stuff, but I think Dani is absolutely with her. I think that’s the thing for me about a great love story- that even if you can’t see that person anymore, even if they’re gone, the idea that you’re looking for them puts them with you whether you can feel it or not.”
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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