Netflix's Haunting anthology seems bent on proving the book is better

'Turn of the Screw' this is not

Henry Thomas.

I don't tend to put a lot of stock in the old cliché about the book being better than the movie. Aside from having the same self-congratulatory ring to it as the person who finds every opportunity to bring up that they "don't own a TV," it just doesn't check out. Great adaptations have of course been made of great literature — Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller The Birds, based on Daphne du Maurier's short story of the same name, comes to mind as a personal favorite — and arguing about which is "better" misses that each work has its own individual identity.

Netflix's Haunting anthology appears bent on proving me wrong. Each season has centered on a different literary haunted house, with the first two rather ambitiously tackling what Stephen King once described as the "only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years," Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House in 2018, and The Haunting of Bly Manor, based on Henry James' Turn of the Screw, out Friday. Though each season, like Hitchcock's The Birds, is only really an "adaptation" in the loosest of terms, the modernizing of the novels and creative liberties with the plots aren't the problem. Rather, by suggesting the comparison at all, the Haunting anthology highlights just how watered down it is compared to its source material.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.