Few things unsettle like a child acting as a child should not. A child knowing what a child should not. A child hosting an unnatural force in the one form humans are hardwired to protect. And what happens when that protection is distorted?
The Innocents – Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw by way of Truman Capote’s savvy script – is about hauntings. An English manor goes to seed, abandoned to a tiny, barely adolescent master and mistress. Its greenhouse overflows, sheets cover rooms shut off from the world, and housekeeper Mrs Grose bustles about her business refusing anything out of the ordinary. When plucky young governess Miss Giddens arrives to care for the girl Flora – and then the boy Miles, when he is suddenly dismissed from boarding school – she is instructed never to bother the guardian. But Bly Manor, with its billowing curtains and slamming windows, may harbour the souls of the previous governess and groundskeeper out for Flora and Miles’s bodies and minds. Or are they figments of overactive imaginations built from the frivolous and fickle minds of children, the dark corners of Victorian repression, or a protective drive perverted?
Released on 15th December 1961, the film unsettles through half-revelations, the idea of possession, and the damage inflicted by the helpers. Cinematographer Freddie Francis fills every corner of a CinemaScope presentation with half-shapes, allowing two faces to occupy the screen at the same time and shifting focus as new implications are uncovered. Manual dissolves from editor Jim Clark evoke the uncanny, claustrophobic, and forbidden – melting living and dead, imagined and mundane into one untrustworthy gaze.
While The Turn of the Screw cloaks a Christmas Eve ghost story in ambiguity (are the ghosts real or imaginary?), The Innocents offers explanations and motives before undercutting them in the next scene. The film comes down strongly on the reality of the ghosts – or at least, on their very real power to ruin lives.
The tale unfolds through the eyes of Deborah Kerr’s Miss Giddens, immersed in her horror as she is drawn through past depravities to her own. Kerr balances a radiant belief in goodness and the terrible confusion that results from suppressed human darkness – certainly within herself. She sees herself as separate: “I like a boy with spirit but not in the degree to contaminate… to corrupt!” The last word becomes a blasphemy, spat out like a rotten grape. She repeatedly insists she will help the children, save the children, but it becomes hard to tell whether she believes these hand-wringing monologues or whether they merely distract from reality.
The figures of Peter Quint on the tower and in the window, and Miss Jessel among the weeds, are almost corporeal. As Miss Giddens implores the children to see these silent, watching figures their nonchalant responses are too measured. “They haven’t been good – they’ve been easy to live with, because they haven’t been living with us,” Miss Giddens exclaims in desperation. The children have arguably not been easy to live with. One minute they embrace, the next Flora scrapes a chalkboard with a maniacal smile and Miles calmly, almost flirtatiously refers to Miss Giddens as “my dear”, calling her “far too pretty to be a governess.”
Here, The Innocents catapults itself beyond the supernatural to the haunting plausibility of abuse. Perhaps, as Miss Giddens guesses, the children are possessed by Quint and Jessell, conduits for their sordid romance (“Rooms… used by daylight… as though they were dark woods,” shudders Mrs Grose). But child psychologists often note mirrored behavior in grooming victims: statements, gestures, and touches of an uncanny maturity. Did Miles learn from watching, or were the children – particularly Miles – victims of Quint’s abuses? Miss Giddens becomes obsessed with “the innocents” – Miles and Flora, Mrs Grose, and to a lesser extent the abused Miss Jessell – and marches her charges towards tragedy.
She wanders Bly at night, voices (“The children are looking!”) echoing in reflective windows and ominous carvings. When she bursts into Flora’s room, the girl is unhurt, merely watching Miles in the hedge garden below. There are no ghosts, just restless, ill-behaved, unknowingly traumatised children.
The following sequence earned the film an X rating upon its UK release. As Miss Giddens tucks Miles into bed, she finds a pigeon with a broken neck under his pillow; a tragedy, says Miles serenely, that he will bury tomorrow. Miles then sits up one last time, kissing Miss Giddens directly on the lips, her own being frozen. When he breaks away, the camera lingers on her unmoving mouth.
It is apt that James’ work lends itself to psychoanalysis: his brother, William James, is called “the father of American psychology”. William’s work may be more grounded in biology and behavior than his European counterparts, but the brothers worked in an era dominated by the Freudian unconscious. In 1934, literary critic Edmund Wilson posited that The Turn of the Screw’s ghosts were hallucinations of the sexually repressed governess, who was the true haunter of the children.
Film scholar David J. Hogan claimed that sexual repression as ghosts were key to both The Innocents and Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. The Haunting is less disturbing, relying on cheap scares that muddle a reading of unspoken lesbian desire. The Innocents, conversely, overtly emphasises quasi-pedophilic connctions between Miles, Quint, and/or Miss Giddens. Interestingly, both James’ and Jackson’s novellas inspired Mike Flanagan’s two Haunting series, turning ghosts and deaths into life-affirming, family-centric tales of unifying shared memory. Flanagan misses the terrifying reality that family is often the first to abandon, that some childhood traumas will never be survived, that secrets cannot be solved with a hug but must be screamed from the highest window, across a lake, in a shadow-filled hedge.
At the end, Miss Giddens demands to know if Miles speaks with Quint; Miles replies with laughing obscenities. She manages to corner him in the garden and sees Quint balancing on a statue. One last time, she begs Miles to see – and for the first time Miles loses composure. He looks about, a real fear staring from his eyes and catching in his voice, almost whispering “Peter Quint, you devil!”. Then he dies.
Miss Giddens does not realize, thinking he has collapsed from the moral victory. Cries of celebration turn to grief when his head rolls back in her arms, and she kisses him – once again on the lips – a blasphemy masked as salvation. The film ends with a black screen save for Miss Giddens’ hands folded in prayer. The only sound is bird noises, but Miss Giddens’ opening lines take on a new connotation:
All I want to do is save the children, not destroy them. More than anything, I love children. More than anything. They need affection. Love. Someone who will belong to them, and to whom they will belong.
Perhaps this immolating obsession with innocence stems less from predation than from repression, confusion, and loss.
The Innocents refuses to romanticize English gentry and gentility, and instead finds the rot in minds and hearts. Bly Manor decays as Miles’ childhood is stripped away. It is an adaptation that expands upon the original, finding new language yet remaining as terrifying, dark, and twisted in the 21st century. Its primal transgressions and corruptions transcend any one reading, as its shadowy wide screen reveals haunted houses less damaging than hollow convictions. The children are lost. 
“The Innocents” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
