SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (24)

By: Max Alvarez
December 20, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

THE INNOCENTS | d. JACK CLAYTON | 1961

When a horror film opens with a job interview, as The Shining notably did, you know things will not go well for the protagonist. In Jack Clayton’s 1961 British masterpiece, The Innocents — a black-and-white chiller which never ceases to traumatize me — Deborah Kerr naïvely applies for a governess position in 19th-century England. Kerr’s Miss Giddens is given fair warning by swinging Victorian-era bachelor Michael Redgrave, the affluent uncle of “two awful infants.” Redgrave wants nothing to do with the “poor brats” and expects governess Giddens to assume “full complete responsibility” once she settles in at his spectacular country estate known as Bly House.

Never mind that the previous governess, Miss Jessel, died under mysterious circumstances.

On the surface, Miss Giddens appears to have landed a dream 19th-century gig: full run of a magnificent, sparsely populated mansion. But the new governess soon senses things might not be quite right at Bly House. Delicate young Flora (Pamela Franklin) takes too much delight in witnessing a spider devouring a butterfly. Then Flora’s charismatic young brother Miles (Martin Stephens), whose unsettling smile usually anticipates a devious action, returns home after being expelled from school for being “an injury to the others.”

And there are the apparitions: the tall, gangly, frightening man who appears on the roof or peers through windows at night; the fragile, weeping woman wandering the dark corridors of Bly House and mournfully observing Miss Giddens from across a lake in broad daylight. The stiff-upper-lipped Miss Giddens realizes these ghostly visions (which may be a figment of her own troubled imagination) are the previous governess and valet whose relationship was, well, unhealthy, to say the least.

Based on the 1898 Henry James novella “The Turn of the Screw” and its William Archibald stage adaptation as sources (with contributing screenwriter Truman Capote turning a few subversive screws of his own), The Innocents retains an ability to elicit psychological fear — at least in me. My first teenage viewing was via a pan-and-scan 16mm print which somehow preserved the creepiness of the narrative. A decade later, I viewed a proper 35mm CinemaScope print at UCLA but made the deranged mistake of sitting in the front row of the cinema. Between anxiety-provoking uses of shadows and widescreen compositions (courtesy of cinematographer and occasional horror director Freddie Francis) to the chilling wind-and-wails sound effects — any accredited physician would have deduced that I was frightened out of my mind.

I still get shortness of breath when the “two awful infants” suggest a nighttime round of Hide and Seek. Or when Miss Giddens ill-advisedly decides to wander the dark mansion at night with a candelabra as voices of the dead make their presences known. Nothing in today’s graphically grisly, computer-generated “gorror” field can unsettle me in quite the same way as The Innocents.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (24)

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