Pamela Franklin as Flora and Martin Stephens as Miles in the 1961 horror-suspense film The Innocents, based on Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. (Twentieth Century Fox)
Horror film connoisseurs are not born. They are made. They are made after watching endless iterations of the jump scare, after several trips to the kitchen or bathroom while basic plot points mount into ratcheting tension, and after nerves and stomach are steeled against dry heaves while viewing mind-bending scenes of death and bodily destruction. The status of “gorehound” is hard won.
These seasonal drills are so familiar to Halloween lovers that it is a good idea to remind ourselves that horror films once aspired to tingle our spines, not lash our senses. To experience that vintage sense of unease we must return to the classics. Perhaps no other film makes that case better than director Jack Clayton’s 1961 masterpiece, The Innocents.
Great source material has been, is, and will forever be twisted into atrocious film adaptations via an infinite number of missteps. Clayton made his first step in the right direction by choosing one of the greatest ghost stories of all time in Henry James’s nonpareil tale of creeping dread, the novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). From there, almost everything else fell into a miraculous, goose-bump inducing film sensation. Those who know James’s novella, in fact, might even conclude that Clayton respected his source material just enough to want to outdo it, but not by much.
James’s story of two English children, Flora and Miles, looked after by a nameless governess on the vast expanse of Bly estate in the countryside was for decades almost every English major’s introduction to the idea of the unreliable narrator. James knew more than most writers exactly what to do with this device, building detail upon counter-veiling detail to question whether the governess was becoming slowly unmoored in her sights of two apparitions hovering near her charges, or if the ghosts of two gruesomely departed servants (Peter Quint and Mary Jessel) who supervised the children before her arrival were, in fact, tangibly real. The chill the story produces results from most readers being unable to decide where their assessment should fall. Uncertainty creates its own horror in the pages of James’s story. That same horror becomes multiplied in The Innocents.
The credit belongs not just to Clayton’s icy ways in framing black-and-white imagery, but also to screenwriter Truman Capote’s uncanny distillation of James’s text. The Innocents preceded In Cold Blood by four years but it is here, long before Capote re-created scenes of a real-life murder at a Kansas farm house, that we experience his talent in making skin crawl.
Ten years after The Turn of the Screw made its firm mark in the ghost story canon James penned a preface for a new edition of his stories giving readers a peek inside his authorial methods and intentions: “Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself—and that already is a charming job—and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think of it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.”
In other words, whatever nasty inferences might be made about this tale, they belong to the reader’s disturbed head, not the prose style of a master the likes of James!
Clayton and Capote play much the same game, but they also tip their hands in disturbing ways that James never did. That they tipped their hands at all makes The Innocents all the more shocking for a black-and-white film released in 1961.
Capote took the broad cues of James’s preface to place them directly into the character’s mouths.
“May I ask you a somewhat personal question?” Michael Redgrave, cast as the bachelor uncle of Flora and Miles, asks the governess-to-be, played by Deborah Kerr. “Do you have an imagination? … Truth is seldom understood by any but imaginative persons, and I want to be quite truthful.”
As the film progresses, and as the ghosts of Quint and Jessel haunt the governess, but not Flora and Miles, who behave in ways simultaneously distant and intimate, it seems obvious that it is the governess alone who is veering closer to insanity. Thanks to the magic of film, though, and the disturbing reticence of the two children, The Innocents makes us believe in ghosts, or at least the horror of being unable to decide what is true or false, or right or wrong, when faced with inexplicable sensations and intuitions.
Ever since the publication of James’s sensational story readers have struggled to articulate what it is that Miles and Flora saw in the behavior of Quint and Jessel when they were alive at Bly. In his opera adaptation of James’s story composer Benjamin Britten never quite spells it out either, even if the tone and tenor of his music makes it clear that the children were sexually abused.
Here, once again, Capote is adept at spelling out what cannot quite be said in the year 1961. When confronted by the governess to describe what Quint and Jessel did in the vast Bly house when alive, the maid Miss Grose grows quiet, then talks slow: “Rooms … used by daylight as though they were dark woods. I don’t know what the children saw, but they used to follow Quint and Miss Jessel, trailing along behind whispering. There was too much whispering in this house, miss.”
Whether or not others see the apparitions that the governess sees, surely something horrid and unspeakable transpired at Bly before the governess arrived. Who would deny that what the governess, expertly portrayed by Kerr, does not see or sense is the psychic damage that Flora and Miles suffered, but cannot bring themselves to divulge, much less express?
At one level, The Innocents portrays the stress and concern we all feel to keep children safe and sound. Given the current spate of QAnon conspiracy theories that hold children’s welfare at their very center, The Innocents could also be seen as a warning against unfounded fears that can backfire to hurt children, or at least protect them unnecessarily. At its blood-chilling core, however, this 99-minute film shows us what might happen if we, too, were faced with the responsibility of keeping someone safe amid circumstances so off-kilter we started to question our own perceptions of what was, or was not, happening. If not a portrait of stress bleeding into insanity, could it perhaps portray the insanity of the world intruding on one woman’s sanity?
When they are not trying to scare us with serial killers that spring back to improbable life, most horror films stuff us to gorging on fantastical tropes and monsters. The Innocents is something altogether different and infinitely more frightening. Watching it brings on the deep, disturbing sense that there is an evil working to crawl its way deep into your mind so it can scare you out of your wits.
