Spoilers ahead for The Haunting of Bly Manor.
Fans of The Haunting of Hill House were certainly expecting hidden ghosts and more traumatic storylines from a mostly familiar cast from Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Bly Manor, but the series delivered on something else we weren’t expecting. As defined during the series finale, Bly Manor is a “love story,” and a tragic one at that. It tells the heartbreaking romance between Victoria Pedrett’s Dani and Amelia Eve’s Jamie between all its horrifying haunts.
At the end of The Haunting of Bly Manor, Dani and Jamie make it out of the property alive, but Dani leaves with a growing reminder of her time as an au pair there. After reciting the words “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” the presence of the Lady of the Lake escapes the water and lives within her. The couple spend a small lifetime as lovers, but it doesn’t last as the pull of Viola brings her back to Bly in the end.
Somehow, the emotional finale between Jamie and Dani could have been a lot more heart-wrenching. Amelia Eve explains one deleted scene at the end of their story with these words:
[There] is a scene between Victoria and I that actually isn’t in the edit—hopefully it’ll be released one day. It comes in between the moment when Dani is about to strangle Jamie [under Viola’s influence], and the moment when she leaves the next morning. We shot a scene where Jamie woke up, and she sees Dani leaving, and she gets her to stay. We filmed that scene and we poured our hearts into it, we were both in tears, and Victoria and I held one another in the scene, but even once they had shouted ‘cut,’ we were still holding onto each other. I think there was just this beautiful feeling of catharsis for the both of us. That really stayed with me.
And we’re back to the grieving process that is Bly Manor. As Amelia Eve told Elle, more footage was shot between Dani and Jamie in their last moments together. In the finale itself, we see Dani come close to strangling Jamie, leading her to disappear one day and Jamie to go after her in Bly Manor. It’s there where she finds Dani at the bottom of the lake.
Before this moment, the pair shot a scene where Jamie begs Dani to stay despite the circumstances of the looming Lady of the Lake. It’s unclear if this additional sequence would have changed the outcome of the story itself, but either way it would have had us sobbing more tears than we already gave to this series.
Amelia Eve certainly sounds like she wishes the moment was in Bly Manor itself, but she’s holding on to hope it will see the light of day in another way. Netflix recently released Enola Holmes deleted scenes, so we’ll have to keep our eyes out.
Following Bly Manor, Mike Flanagan is working on another horror Netflix series called Midnight Mass, which will see the return of Bly Manor’s Rahul Kohli, Kate Siegel and Henry Thomas. Check out what else is new to the streaming platform with our list of what’s new to Netflix in October.
