Classic Stories We Want To See From The Haunting Series

Edgar Allan Poe was a master of the mysterious and the macabre during his 40 years, so he would be a perfect fit for The Haunting series. Which one of Poe's books should Mike Flanagan and team adapt? Uh, all of them. After all, The Haunting of Bly Manor did adapt Henry James' 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw and his 1868 short story "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes." Okay, we know they can't really adapt all of Poe's work, so where would we start with The Haunting of Poe's Place (we're still working on the title)? 

Well, we don't have to ponder weak and weary for very long to know there needs to be a reference to Poe's most famous work — his 1845 poem "The Raven" – be it a plot element, episode, or just a recurring bird, since we're not above shameless fan service. Beyond that, the obvious answer would be Poe's 1839 supernatural short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," about a man who visits the home of his childhood friend, a house which he believes has absorbed evil. The Haunting of The House of Usher — there's your title! Throw in a little bit of "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe's 1843 short story about a man haunted by the beating heart of his murdered victim, and "Annabel Lee," Poe's final completed poem, a paean to a dead lover, and you've got yourself a show!

It's ironic that the most famous ghost story is also the most famous Christmas story (with all due respect to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation) — Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Then and now, Dickens' 1843 novel is a best seller, and its 10,347,986 film adaptations (give or take a few) are so ubiquitous with the holiday season that some may forget it's a ghost story. Dickens certainly didn't, as he even subtitled it Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. It may seem unlikely to stretch A Christmas Carol's 176 pages into a multi-episode mini-series, but Bly Manor's showrunners already accomplished a similar feat with Henry James' 126-page novella The Turn of the Screw. We have no doubt they're up to the challenge, particularly if they pepper it with some of Dickens' other ghost stories. 

The big question is, do we really want to see another adaptation of A Christmas Carol? Especially since the greatest one is, and always will be, A Muppet Christmas Carol (don't try to change our minds, you can't)? No, we don't want to see another "been there, done that" adaptation of A Christmas Carol — we want to see this one. An adaptation that balances darkness with lightness, scares with sadness, and is ultimately a story of human redemption. That balance was what made Hill House and Bly Manor so great, and it certainly applies to Dickens' classic. The Haunting of Ebenezer Scrooge is most definitely not a "bah, humbug!"

Shirley Jackon's most famous novel is of course her 1959 ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House, which has been adapted to film twice as The Haunting, first in Robert Wise's 1963 film starring Claire Bloom and Julie Harris, and later in Jan de Bont's 1999 film starring Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Owen Wilson. Oh yeah, and in 2018 as the Netflix series. But while The Haunting of Hill House gets all of the love, it wasn't the only Shirley Jackson story to deal with the strange and the mysterious. 

Her final work, 1962's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is a haunted house story without the ghosts, a dark fairy tale where the creepiness comes from the way human beings can treat each other when pushed to the brink. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is about two girls who live in isolation with their uncle following a family tragedy. Their claustrophobic and isolated existence is threatened when a cousin with dark objectives arrives at their estate. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was recently adapted, and it actually came out soon after The Haunting of Hill House, but despite its solid reviews (87% from critics and 77% from audiences), it wasn't widely seen. That wouldn't be the case should it ever get The Haunting treatment.

With its ghostly possessions, haunted dreamscapes, and even time travel, The Haunting series isn't your standard "what was that spooky sound?" ghost story. For a mainstream horror series, it's fairly experimental. Well, there's nothing mainstream about Mark Z. Danielewski's extremely experimental bestselling 2000 horror novel, House of Leaves. Danielewski's debut novel is about a documentary that showcases a family that moves into a house that's impossibly larger on the inside than it is on the outside. As in, it's a conventional home that has a giant maze and spiral staircase inside it. 

If you haven't read it, that's about all we can tell you without you feeling like you (or we) are tripping on acid. It's an example of ergodic literature, which is a fancy way of saying that it's not just the story but how the book's arranged that's part of the reading experience. There are copious footnotes, references to fictional work, pages with only a few words, even lines of text arranged to mirror the events of the story. It's a lot like if David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest were a haunted house story. While The Haunting series had to modernize stories to make them appeal to modern viewers, the showrunners would actually have to tone down House of Leaves' eccentricity to make it palatable. Like Hill House and Bly Manor, it'd be a loose adaptation, but a House of Leaves series would be intense.

Stephen King (who we'd say is an authority on the horror genre) declared Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger "the #1 book of 2009." Not the number one horror book — the number one book, period. He also added that "several sleepless nights are guaranteed." Aw man, we're in. The Little Stranger is the newest book on this list, so it may not qualify as a "classic" yet, but it definitely qualifies for The Haunting series. Set in the postwar English countryside, a country doctor finds his life entwined with a once-wealthy family who owns a crumbling Georgian mansion known as Hundreds Hall that's suffering a series of supernatural events. 

Okay, so that may not sound like the most compelling storyline, but the novel's power is its sophisticated portrayal of class, wealth, and the crumbling English aristocracy. There are also ghosts. So it's basically The Haunting of Downton Abbey. The Little Stranger was made into a film in 2018, but it wasn't widely seen, and it only managed mediocre reviews (65% from critics and 36% from audiences), so it's ripe for a reimagining by the team behind The Haunting series.

Okay, we know what you're thinking. "These guys are nuts!" Yes, we're suggesting adapting the most popular movie ever as a ghost story, but hear us out — Gone with the Wind is already a ghost story, but the "ghost" isn't a person. Instead, it's the Old South. Here's our pitch. Gone with the Wind had the most famous cliffhanger in the history of literature and film. Scarlett O'Hara finally realizes she loves her husband, Rhett Butler, who tells her, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," and leaves her anyway. She resigns herself to her fate, convinced she'll get Rhett Butler back. The end. But what if she doesn't? What if the beautiful southern belle who could have any man she ever wanted dies an old crone in her family's Georgia plantation, Tara? 

Cut to 150 years later. An African-American family moves into the home, only to find it's haunted by the ghost of Scarlett and her former slaves, like Mammy and Percy. It's wacky, but we'd be into it. There's precedent for this type of storytelling too, as Watchmen and Lovecraft Country appropriated great literature as a springboard for commentary on race relations. Problem is, Gone with the Wind is owned by WarnerMedia, which owns Netflix's competitor, HBO Max, so we'll probably never see The Haunting of Tara, absent an unprecedented and highly unlikely cross-platform partnership. Still, we can dream. As Scarlett said, "After all, tomorrow is another day."