Two years after the release of The Haunting of Hill House, Netflix’s follow-up series The Haunting of Bly Manor is scaring audiences all over again – but what will The Haunting season 3 be about? Rather than being a direct sequel to the first series, Bly Manor is more of a spiritual sequel featuring a new house, a new story, and a new group of characters (some of whom are played by actors from Hill House).
What the two series so far have in common is that they are loose adaptations of existing ghost stories (Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw) with a heavy focus on character studies. Speaking to Vanity Fair, The Haunting creator Mike Flanagan said that “at its foundation, the Haunting series is very much about haunted spaces and haunted people,” and that despite telling different stories, this approach is what makes Hill House and Bly Manor uniform.
With a critically-acclaimed first series and overwhelmingly positive reviews for the second, the odds of The Haunting season 3 are looking very good. Here’s everything we know so far about the future of the series.
The Haunting Season 3 Hasn’t Been Announced (Yet)
![What To Expect From The Haunting Season 3](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Haunting-of-Hill-House-and-Bly-Manor-Ghosts.jpg)
Netflix hasn’t yet announced The Haunting season 3, but that’s no cause for concern. The streaming service typically waits anything from a few weeks to a few months before announcing renewals, in order to gauge viewing numbers. For example, The Haunting of Hill House was released in October 2019, and The Haunting of Bly Manor wasn’t announced until February 2019. As in that case, Netflix will likely want to wait until the story and title of the next season has been decided upon before making an announcement.
The Haunting Season 3 Release Date
![Rebecca in a poster for The Haunting of Bly Manor](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/The-Haunting-of-Bly-Manor-Rebecca.jpg)
Both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor released in October (2018 and 2020, respectively), which means that a third series is likely to target an October 2022 release – just in time to give fans another spooky Halloween. As an anthology series, the production process for The Haunting is more complex than serialized shows due to the need to develop the story, put together a cast, and build wholly new sets for each new series – hence the two-year wait for Bly Manor.
The Haunting Season 3 Story Details
![The Hill House from Haunting of Hill House](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Netflixs-The-Haunting-of-Hill-House-Header-Crop.jpg)
In keeping with the first two series, The Haunting season 3 can be expected to loosely adapt a famous ghost story, expanding it beyond its original parameters with a focus on the living characters involved as much as the ghosts. There are no shortage of stories about haunted houses to adapt, so the challenge would be in selecting a story that may have drifted somewhat out of the collective consciousness, so that a new adaptation can still feel fresh. For example, both The Haunting of Hill House and The Turn of the Screw were most famously adapted in the 1960s (as The Haunting and The Innocents, respectively), but more recent adaptations failed to live up to those early horror films.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is actually based on a number of Henry James stories, not just The Turn of the Screw, so The Haunting season 3 could continue in this style by (for example) mixing up a selection of M.R. James ghost stories. Alternatively it could focus on a single ghost story, like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (The Haunting of the House of Usher has a nice ring to it). Stephen King’s The Shining would also be a good fit, but an unlikely one given that Flanagan already tackled that particular haunted house in his recent film Doctor Sleep. Until there’s more news about which story The Haunting will explore next, the possibilities remain wide open.