Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Spectral Horror in The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Bly Manor

This study offers a comprehensive psychoanalytic examination of horror elements in Henry James’s seminal Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) and its contemporary Netflix adaptation, The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) created by Mike Flanagan. Employing Freudian concepts of repression, the uncanny (das Unheimliche), and dreamwork alongside Lacanian theories of the Symbolic Order and the Real, this paper conducts a rigorous comparative analysis of how psychological horror manifests across literary and visual mediums. The research demonstrates how Flanagan's adaptation not only preserves but amplifies James's central themes of unreliable narration, subconscious fears, and psychological disintegration through modern cinematic techniques and narrative innovations. Through close textual analysis of James's novella and frame-by-frame examination of Flanagan's visual storytelling, this study reveals how both works employ Gothic tropes as externalizations of internalized trauma. Key findings indicate that while James's work operates through deliberate ambiguity, Flanagan's adaptation makes trauma visually manifest while maintaining psychological complexity. This evolution reflects broader cultural changes in how we understand and represent mental distress, positioning Bly Manor as both a faithful adaptation and a significant reimagining for contemporary audiences. By bridging literary analysis, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this research contributes new insights to adaptation studies while demonstrating the enduring relevance of Freudian and Lacanian frameworks for understanding horror across media. The study ultimately argues that both versions use the Gothic mode to explore fundamental questions about perception, memory, and the haunting persistence of unresolved trauma.