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.”
Eli Roth is a formative name in the “Splat Pack” of ultraviolent filmmakers who first came to fame during the 2000s.
Roth’s Cabin Fever was a great statement piece, but he’s managed to continually top himself with gory gems like Hostel, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving. Roth has always been a filmmaker who strives to push boundaries and embrace a passion for genre cinema.
His latest movie, Ice Cream Man, is a project that’s been 20 years in the making. It’s a twisted take on the Pied Piper parable that’s arguably the most gruesome film from Roth’s career and an exciting turning point.
To celebrate the gory film’s summer release, Eli Roth opens up about the luxury of shooting a horror film with hundreds of enthusiastic kids, bypassing the MPAA to deliver the most outrageous kills of his career, and why he intentionally avoided Weapons before filming.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: You’ve described Ice Cream Man as “The Birds but with children” and cited Who Can Kill a Child? as a reference point. Were there other “killer kid” movies that you’re pulling from for inspiration like Children of the Corn, the French film Them, or even Weapons?
ELI ROTH: Well, Weapons I purposely didn’t watch until after I was done with my cut because I had people on the crew that went to see it because I wanted to make sure that there was no crossover. I didn’t watch it until after I was done with the film, but The Children from 1980 was a big influence. That trailer scared me as a kid, watching the kids on the bus go through the gas and then turn into killer kids. When the girl killed her mom in the original Night of the Living Dead was a big reference point. But definitely The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also other movies like Bad News Bears and those early Amblin movies. Those coming-of-age films. There’s also a lot of references to Bird with the Crystal Plumage in there, too. It’s kind of a Pied Piper story, so that was really the starting point for it.
There must have been serious hurdles to not just filming a movie that involves so many children, but also in terms of its rating and censorship. Was there anything you shot that had to be cut or toned down?
ER: The whole reason I started The Horror Section was to completely bypass that system and go directly to the theaters. Now that Terrifier 3 kicked the door open for the rest of us and you can have an unrated movie go out in 2000 theaters, you know that fans want to go see those movies in theaters. Before, you could never release an unrated movie like this, but now after what Damien Leone did, you can. So I set up an independent studio, I went right to the theaters, I’m self-releasing it, and I didn’t even deal with the MPAA. I just made the movie the way I wanted to make it. We shot it, cut it, and we’re putting it out in the theaters raw and unfiltered.
Every movie I’ve ever made, at some point someone has said, “You have to take this out, or we’re not releasing the movie.” I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’m just tired of it. I think they’re wrong. I think Terrifier 3 proved that they are all strong. In the past, I’ve been like, “I shouldn’t have taken that out. I shouldn’t have cut that down,” but you’re dealing with a corporation in a studio. That’s what they do. They’re so afraid, and it’s an abstract argument. There’s no proof that they’re right or that you’re right, but that’s where I know great horror lives. It’s got that bit of danger to it. You go, “You’re not supposed to do that,” “Should I be watching this?”
Even Evil Dead II, Faces of Death, or whatever it was when you get a tape. Whenever you’re going, “I shouldn’t watch this,” it becomes the most exciting kind of horror. Even The Ring. It’s got to be great. It’s got to be original. There has to be an incredible story that people have never seen before, but I faced no issues whatsoever other than my own budget. The whole purpose of starting my own studio is that I could take an idea like Ice Cream Man, that I’ve always wanted to do and that everyone told me I couldn’t, and just go for it.
On that note, there are so many amazing kills in this movie. What’s your favorite and which was the most challenging to pull off?
ER: There are a few, yeah. My original idea was the mother waking up and seeing her daughter just standing over her; she picks up a hacksaw and just cuts her head off. The dad wakes up, looks over, and the daughter is just smiling and cutting the head off and like, “Hi, Daddy.” Then the kid bashes his face in. So actually doing all that was extremely satisfying. There were a couple other ones that I don’t want to give away that really turned out great. I was just really lucky. I sat down with Steve Newburn at Applied Arts FX Studio. They’re incredible. I told them, “I want to do more kills. I want to basically beat every kill I’ve ever done and do more kills in this movie than all my other movies combined.” Adrian Moreau was incredibly genius. We did Thanksgiving together, and she did some very specific effects for me on this one. She won the Oscar for The Whale, so we had an incredibly talented team and just went for it. The kids in the movie, their parents are all horror movie fans, so we talked to them about everything.
Once you put the kids in the gore and in the makeup, they go right into it. They get it. They understand that this is like Halloween and pretend. There’s the bit where they’re pulling apart a body — they call it a “taffy pull” — we did this fake trailer, “The Piano Killer,” with Hailey Kittle. I also worked with her in Trick VR Treat, and she was in Thanksgiving. I said, “I’m going to drop a piano on you,” so we had her fake body and thought, “Let’s kill Hailey, and then we can use the body from “The Piano Killer” and pull it apart in Ice Cream Man. I recycled the same body parts.
It was unreal doing it all with the kids, though. You can’t believe what you’re watching, and the kids were having a great time. It was Christmas morning for them. Justin Harding, who was my Second Unit Director, his son Bowen is a baseball player. So it made sense to give Bowen the axe so that he could really give a good swing to cut Hailey in half. He is so good and so athletic, so he could really go for it. He’s just gleefully swinging the bat, and we’re just on the ground pumping blood at him. The kids were just laughing and having the time of their lives.
The main actors are so good, too. I really didn’t want “kid acting.” I wanted the same acting as when you’re watching Stranger Things or the ’70s Bad News Bears. These kids are real kids, and I didn’t want it to feel like movie dialogue. I wanted the kids to swear and talk the way that real 12-year-olds talk to each other and the way that bullies talked to me in the ’80s. I verified it with all the kids to know that this is exactly what the bullying in schools sounds like. This is how they’d talk and what they say when the adults, parents, and teachers aren’t around. I wanted it to feel naturalistic, and like you’ve just been dropped into this small town that has all this drama. Then you’re just with these kids, trying to survive this “kidpocalypse,” and trying to figure out why this is happening and how to get out of it.
I’m a huge fan of the Clint Howard Ice Cream Man from 1995. There’s also a great Tales from the Crypt episode with Bill Pullman and Brad Dourif that plays in this space. Why do you think there’s this ongoing connection between ice cream men and horror?
ER: It’s interesting; I’ve never seen the Clint Howard film. I’m certainly aware of it. But this all came about from just watching this ice cream man handing out ice cream. It was during the Cabin Fever press tour in 2003. I was just watching this ice cream man and thinking, “We just trust them.” It could be a serial killer, you know? What if they just rolled into town and poisoned the kids? I thought that might be too fucked up, but then I thought of it as if it’s the Pied Piper. There’s something with the music. Kids just want to run out into the street and buy ice cream when they hear that ice cream man music. It’s such deep programming. So what if that was used to turn the kids against their parents?
Having a new daughter myself — having a baby — all you want to do is protect them. And you know that no matter what you do, you can’t. The outside world is going to get to them somehow. You can prepare them, but you can’t fully protect them. Some evil force will get into their head, and so what if that was turned against you? This thing that you loved and put everything into now wants to kill you. It’s the most horrible thought as a parent. After 20 years, it was kind of great to go in and re-approach it from that direction.
But I think ice cream men just have this inherent trust behind them. You see them, and you trust them. They come into the neighborhood, feed the kids, and then they leave, and you have no idea who they really were. Sure, they were an ice cream man, but what were they like? They were wearing a white hat, and they drove an ice cream truck, but anyone can do that. It was such a perverse, sick thought. Like, “What if you turn Thanksgiving into something awful?”, “What if backpacking in Europe became a nightmare?”
That’s where great horror lives. It’s when you take something that’s seemingly innocent and then make it dark. “What if the kids are playing jump rope, but then they get turned, and they’re playing jump rope with guts?” At the beginning of the film, they’re playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” but then it’s “Pin the Knife in the Teacher.” Or you’re playing little league baseball, but now you’re bashing your dad’s head in with the bat. It’s taking all the fun, innocent things from childhood and then twisting them with a horror spin.
Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.
You must be logged in to post a comment.