For some reason, I have written quite a lot about adaptations of Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw. And look, let me make it clear, I totally get why so many filmmakers and other creatives keep having a crack at it: more than a hundred years after it came out, it’s still one of the most enduring and compelling pieces of psychological horror ever created. I never want to see people stop adapting this book – it’s so rich and so open to interpretation, it invites new approaches to the excellent story.
But I think there is one version of it that stands out above all the rest. And that’s Jack Clayton’s 1961 adaptation, The Innocents, starring Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, a replacement governess to a mysterious pair of children in a lonely, apparently haunted mansion.
There’s so much good stuff to say about this movie, it’s hard to know where to start. I think this is Deborah Kerr’s best performance, as she swings between victim and victimiser of the children in her care, and Meg Jenkins is a perfect, grounded foil for her as housekeeper Mrs Grose. The mansion setting is perfect – eerie and empty and huge, just waiting to be filled by the ghosts that haunt Giddens, real or imagined. The script, co-written by Truman Capote, is tight and constantly feels as though it’s barrelling towards this horrible, inevitable end, and Clayton does an effective job with a few scares that stand up even today.
But I think what The Innocents gets the most right is how it uses the titular innocent children at the story’s heart. Creepy children have become a bit of a trope in horror, but the performances from Pamela Franklin as Flora and especially Martin Stephens as Miles hit a kind of unsettling nuance that I haven’t seen much, even in films much later in the horror canon. The way Stephens plays Miles – this child haunted by the guidance of a violently misogynistic man who felt an ownership, sexually, physically, and emotionally, over the women close to him – swings between childish and discomfortingly adult, sometimes in the same scene, and it renders the kids one of the scariest parts of the movie.
And one that no other adaptation has, for my money, done quite as well. Depicting children in this way is naturally unsettling, but really leaning into it (and casting such a great child actor in the role) is what makes The Innocents such an outstanding version of this story.
Have you seen The Innocents? How does it compare to other adaptations of The Turn of the Screw? Let me know in the comments!
If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, please consider supporting us on Ko-Fi. You can check out more of my work on my personal blog, The Cutprice Guignol!
By Lou MacGregor
(header image via TCM)
No But Listen 