I'm a weak and fragile gay who is too soft for horror, but I'm also a weak and fragile gay who wrote her senior thesis in high school on THE TURN OF THE SCREW, so here we go: lunch break #HauntingOfBlyManor!

My lights are on, I'm eating a sandwich, I feel safe, let's do this

DISCLAIMERS

--No, I haven't seen "Hill House" yet, I'm starting with the one where I know the source material and have read every Vulture recap in advance in the hopes of minimizing nightmares

--This will be an "ooh, that's different from the book!" spoiler-filled thread

okay the credits are my kind of spooky, CREEPY OLD PAINTINGS YES PLZ

My first encounter with TURN OF THE SCREW was the two-actor stage adaptation at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (still one of my all-time fave theatre experiences) where one actress plays the governess and one actor plays everyone else (the uncle, Miles, Mrs. Grose, etc.)

The most creepy and chilling thing about that play is that you never see Flora

When they talk to Flora they're always just talking to air

SCARIEST SHIT I'VE EVER SEEN, LITTLE GIRLS ARE CREEPY AS FUCK

all this to say that as soon as I saw the portrait of Miles and Flora I was like "okay this is what's gonna fuck me up"

HELLO SILVER-HAIRED MILF CARLA GUGINO, the primary reason why I'm in this

rehearsal dinner toast guy: "happy future marriage! if you don't get a divorce you'll have to watch each other die!"

*merry laughter*

Carla Gugino's white streak is too foreboding for this Northern California chill winery hang

"To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the risk of losing them" okay show you got me

wait can season 3 be the backstory of the ghost nun they just casually mention apparently haunts the wedding venue because I'd watch that too tbh

also, this framing device - person at party sitting by fire says "HEY SPEAKING OF GHOSTS" and then starts spinning the tale - is in fact taken from the book

it doesn't involve any of the actual characters, though, it's like "I met this ex-governess once and whew her backstory"

This line is straight from the book - "if the presence of a child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children" i'm paraphrasing but it's basically the same line

if a kid makes a ghost story scarier, two kids is a 100% increase in scare (SCIENCE)

so right off the bat, and this is a book and show spoiler, but James alludes pretty heavily throughout to the idea that the ghosts are never real, and that an overeager young governess who wants to be a hero to impress the mysterious uncle for whom she harbors repressed desire

and one of the things that I was actually very excited about that made me want to watch the show is the fact that that's NOT the case; I'm just not in a headspace where watching a woman go insane and destroy lives for Victorian heteronormativity reasons is my jam rn

obviously I immediately love Dani (HEY THANKS FOR GIVING THE GOVERNESS A NAME, WRITER WHO IS NOT HENRY JAMES) and think the uncle is kind of a d-bag

"DON'T BUG ME ABOUT THE KIDS UNLESS IT'S A WHOLE EMERGENCY" this is also from the book

ooooh i love that she is immediately not intimidated by him and knows there's a catch (it's ghosts the catch is ghosts that's the catch)

I don't remember the uncle being at all conscious of the ghost shit in the book

he's just like "yeah the uhhhh position abruptly came available" and she learns everything about Quint and Jessel when she gets there, from what I recall

OOOOH FIRST GHOST

someone in the mirror at her hostel!

as a conceit, I like "the governess arrives also bringing her own ghosts with her" way more than "the governess hallucinates the ghosts for sex reasons"

I would immediately die for Owen

Owen just casually foreshadowing that most people in Bly "are born here and die here"

welp

Flora is immediately terrifying

just casually singing a death song next to a lake, making poppets, and saying "perfectly splendid" an alarming amount

Mrs. Grose is kind of unsettling in the book, just because the governess is such an unreliable narrator and therefore they're occasionally at odds about what to do about the children

but in a "the ghosts are definitely real" adaptation many of those problems go away

like on the one hand sometimes in the book she's an antagonist, thwarting the governess' plans to keep the children safe from Quint and Jessel; but if you interpret it like the governess is just losing her whole shit, then Mrs. Grose suddenly becomes the only trustworthy adult

anyway I read the Vulture recaps so I know about the Plot Twist with her and I'm very excited and love her already

me: this is great i feel so strong i haven't been scared at all yet congratulations on my growth

also me: claire it's been nineteen minutes and nothing has happened yet

Flora craftily telling Dani what's boring and not worth bothering with - like the lake and the classroom - when you know that all those locations are literally ghosts headquarters

The very icky romantic/sexual energy that Miles has toward the governess also pops up in the book and is one of the signs she uses to determine that he's being possessed by Quint's ghost, though of course in the book if the ghosts aren't real it's possible he's just a creep

kid you really don't want to go to Florida

CLUES WORTH NOTING
--Hannah doesn't eat or drink anything
--Dani keeps looking at mirrors because that's where the glowing eye socket ghost lives
--the hair clip is clearly a thing

In the book, both the governess and Mrs. Grose dote on Miles to a borderline-smothering degree and decide that whatever horrible shit got him suspended from school couldn't possibly be his fault because he's a perfect lil angel

this show seems .... not headed that direction

I was told by a showrunner interview that Flora's dollhouse - which is honestly fucking epic - also has clues, and this is our first peek at it

I would have killed for this dollhouse as a kid, my sister and I were RIDE OR DIE for miniatures

oh jesus christ she's made dollhouse dolls for all the ghosts and placed them where they live in the house, hasn't she

son of a bitch i'm not gonna survive this show

"don't leave your room at night" is so great and creepy because you can't quite tell whether it's a terrifying threat or a genuinely well-intentioned warning

also girl why would you want to look out your spooky window at night

WHY ARE YOU GOING FOR A WALK AT NIGHT

WTF

okay I'm pausing here to get some more work done and then I'll come back to this later but damn someone needs to tell this girl what show she's in because not for one billion dollars would I just go for a casual midnight wander around a house like that

just finished work for the day and gotta wrap this episode up before it gets dark and i'm Too Scared so let's go, chaotic governess going for a night walk in the world's most obviously haunted mansion

She’s making TEA what the FUCK why is she LIKE this girl just take a thermos to bed with you next time!!!!! This is irresponsible haunted house behavior!!!!!!!!!!!!

That said, goddamn I covet this kitchen aesthetic

The teapot just whistled and both Dani and I freaked the fuck out in unison

I knew from the recaps I read that the plague doctor ghost was gonna be a thing but it is still chilling AF to like almost-but-not-quite see him in the background while Dani just cheerfully wanders around

Okay so Flora doesn’t like spiders (mood) and Miles doesn’t want Flora mentioning “the lady in the lake” cool cool not sinister at all

It really is so fucking sad how few adults there are in these kids’ lives they can actually trust

Miles knows his uncle doesn’t give a shit about them

First Peter Quint sighting!!!!!!! Creepy af

but who cares because also FIRST LESBIAN GARDENER SIGHTING

yikes she’s out on the parapet where she saw the ghost and there’s another one of Flora’s TRANSPARENTLY HAUNTED DOLLS

Miss Jessel was awesome and ambitious and brilliant “..... but there was a man. Which is really the only thing that can bring down a woman like that.”

I’m genuinely so excited that Jessel is going to be an actual CHARACTER in this show and not just like .... an empty space

sure, guys

he “skipped town”

he definitely ran away alive and voluntarily never to be seen again and is somewhere on the earth right now just being super extremely not dead

that is a thing that for sure happened, I have no reason to doubt this story

I’m trying to remember from the book if they know Quint is also dead from the jump or if they find his body at some point AFTER the governess starts seeing his ghost everywhere

I think she comes into it knowing they’re both dead but I’m not sure

One fun thing I just remembered is that in the book she first sees Peter’s ghost on the parapet after coming back from a walk where she’s been dreamily thinking about the uncle and wanting to like, have him praise her for what a great job she’s doing

So the implication is that Quint is like a manifestation of her repressed desire for another man

It’s interesting that here it comes alongside a really sad little reminder of how the uncle’s visible indifference and neglect has severely harmed the children

I just think the uncle is a lot more interesting as a figure in the story when triangulated between the kids and their parents, who matters in his role as a guardian, and not as someone who primarily exists only to the governess

There are four candles lit in the chapel votive rack, which Hannah says are “for the dead,” which I believe tracks with what I know from the Vulture recaps of how many dead people there are in the story

“Do you like games?”
“Not at bedtime.”
“That’s the best time for games, really.”

God this is icky

Dani accidentally kicking the One Clearly Significant Doll, picking it up to find Flora sitting BOLT UPRIGHT AND STARING AT HER, and then the immediate appearance of Miles from the other room with an obviously bullshit distraction, has traumatized me

THEY LOCKED HER IN THE CLOSET