Netflix's Haunting Of Hill House Becoming Anthology Series With New Chapter Haunting Of Bly Manor

New place, new story, same spooks. 

Netflix announced on Thursday that it had renewed its hit horror series The Haunting of Hill House for another season. But not just any ol' season — a new installment in what's now an anthology collection.

A bit of background information: The Haunting of Hill House creator Mike Flanagan and executive producer Trevor Macy have, as Variety details, penned a deal with the streamer. The ink is drying on a "multi-year" television deal between Netflix and the creatives, who are set to produce several projects for streaming exclusively on Netflix. 

"Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy are masterful at creating authentically frightening stories that leave audiences on the edge of their seats, but unable to look away," Netflix's vice president of original content Cindy Holland said in a statement accompanying the news. "We're excited to continue our partnership with them on The Haunting series and future projects to come."

Said Flanagan and Macy, "Netflix has been an important part of our story, and we're proud to have worked with them on The Haunting of Hill House, not to mention Gerald's Game, Hush, and Before I Wake. They've enabled and supported a great deal of our work and we look forward to much more."

First up in Flanagan and Macy's docket is the sophomore entry into what's now and will forevermore be known as The Haunting anthology – The Haunting of Bly Manor. 

Netflix dropped the bombshell over on Twitter, sharing to the official page for The Haunting of Hill House a tweet that reads, "You guessed it. The HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR, a new chapter in the Haunting series based on the works of Henry James, is coming in 2020." Attached to the tweet is a GIF of the upcoming season's title card, which features the same font used in The Haunting of Hill House's title, displayed across a moving shot of the night sky.

For those unfamiliar, Henry James was an author prominent in the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s, and is remembered as a lynchpin in the rise of literary modernism and realism. Among his most notable works are The American, The Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, Daisy Miller, The Ambassadors, Washington Square, and The Turn of the Screw. That last one, a horror novella published in 1898, takes place at Bly mansion, a fictional country house in England where two "weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent" orphans named Miles and Flora are looked after by a young woman working as the estate's governess.

The Turn of the Screw's official synopsis reveals that the mansion is "haunted by a beckoning evil ... half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows [and] silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer." As the horror grows, the governess becomes increasingly helpless — even more so when she discovers that the creatures haunting Bly estate want to corrupt the Miles and Flora's bodies, "possess their minds, own their souls." The twist? Miles and Flora aren't afraid of the forces of evil, as "they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them."

Now, we can't say for certain that this is exactly what The Haunting of Bly Manor will entail, given that no one involved with the anthology entry has released concrete story and character details at this point in time. But considering Netflix confirmed The Haunting of Bly Manor is based on James' works and that Bly manor is the setting of The Turn of the Screw, it seems that Haunting fans should ready themselves for creepy orphans, a terrified governess, and lurking horrors in 2020. 

It comes as no surprise that Netflix is keeping The Haunting of Hill House going, since viewers took to the horror-tastic first season like Marvel enthusiasts take to Avengers: Endgame theories. (This is to say that they were slightly obsessed, couldn't get enough, and were almost unable to think about anything else for weeks on end.) Inspired by Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel, The Haunting of Hill House told the story of the Crain family and documented the many tragedies that befell the siblings as they grew up in the haunted home for which the series is named. Flicking between the past and present, each episode unraveled the unique horrors Steven, Shirley, Theodora, Luke, and Nell faced 26 years ago and the ones they still deal with in their adulthood. After a reunion with their estranged father, the Crains experience another tragic loss, and must confront the hold the Hill House has continued to have on them.

When The Haunting of Hill House debuted on Netflix on October 12, 2018, it quickly became the "the third most 'in-demand' horror show among audiences," only losing out to American Horror Story and The Walking Dead, which have been on air for the better part of a decade (via Business Insider). That The Haunting of Hill House soared to the top of the list so quickly and came behind two of the most beloved and well-known horror shows of the last 10 years says a lot — as does its critical response. The series amassed glowing reviews that praised it as "stylish, moving, and sinister, riddled with ghosts both literal and metaphorical"; "deeply creepy but unexpectedly moving, especially in the series' gorgeously paced midsection"; and a "new high watermark for episodic horror."

Whether The Haunting of Bly Manor will pull an American Horror Story and bring back any Hill House actors (like Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Michael HuismanMckenna Grace, Elizabeth Reaser, Timothy Hutton, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, or Victoria Pedretti) to play new characters is up to Netflix to decide. In any case, be on the lookout for The Haunting of Bly Manor on Netflix next year.