First images from Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House season 2 released

If things are starting to go bump in the night again, don't be afraid; it's just the ghosts from The Haunting of Hill House season 2 – AKA the Haunting of Bly Manor – coming back to haunt you again. With the Netflix series returning this fall, Vanity Fair has released a bunch of new images for us to gleam.

There aren't many ghosts. Well, not yet. And the images are surprisingly bright and colourful for such a creepy show. They also feature familiar actors from the first season, such as Oliver Jackson-Cohen, yet they aren't playing the same characters. Have a look below.

A new family. pic.twitter.com/CXIihbriXhAugust 24, 2020

Why are the same actors playing different characters? That's because the new season is an adaptation of new material: Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. However, as revealed by GamesRadar+ last year, that's not the only ghost tale the series will tell: expect elements from The Jolly Corner, about a menacing doppelgänger, and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, about two sisters and a mysterious chest of beloved dresses, to feature.

“The process is the same, in that it’s a literary remix,” producer Trevor Macy told Vanity Fair. “You want to update the story, you want to find whatever fertile ground for elevating the character that you can in the source material, but we obviously took some liberties in updating it with a more modern setting.”

Starring alongside Oliver Jackson-Cohen once again are Kate Siegel and Peter Quint. “Much is made about him in the book about being a very toxic person, and particularly toxic within relationships,” showrunner Mike Flanagan ssaid. “One of the things that was exciting for Ollie this year, having played this very broken and vulnerable in season one, was to come in and play a villain, but trying to find a way to play a villain that wasn’t so simple. That was just something else we tried very hard to say: people are good and bad, all of us. Sometimes the dials are turned a little too far, or a lot too far, in one direction or the other.”

You may also notice that there are a lot of dolls in the pictures. That's because they play a key part in this story. “Dolls, for children, are a way to play with representations of real people,” Flanagan said. “I think for kids, it’s about control. Kids have such little agency. Dolls provide that. But there’s also a darker side to it.

"Ownership, claiming someone, ceasing to look at them as a human, and instead, looking at them as an object, as a doll… we can draw lines to all sorts of toxic romantic relationships that way, and get into gender politics and the objectification of women in particular by this genre.”

Sound like we're going to get some very scary doll action. The Haunting of Hill House season 2 still does not have a specific release date. Before it reaches Netflix, be sure to catch up on all the best Netflix movies and all the best creepy doll movies (because, yes, we have a list for that).

Jack Shepherd is the former Senior Entertainment Editor of GamesRadar. Jack used to work at The Independent as a general culture writer before specializing in TV and film for the likes of GR+, Total Film, SFX, and others. You can now find Jack working as a freelance journalist and editor.