‘It was only the wind, my dear…’
Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is one of the most influential haunted house stories of all time. The ambiguity and pulsating seeds of doubt that define that novella have come to shape the entire haunted house subgenre for decades to come. Indeed, it once again re-entered the zeitgeist in 2020 after providing loose inspiration for Mike Flanagan’s execrable Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor. If you hated that adaptation as much as I did, fear not, because The Innocents is everything that Bly Manor should have been…
When Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) wins employment as a governess for two young children, it seems like she has landed her dream job. Young Flora (Pamela Franklin) and precocious Miles (Martin Stephens) are not as angelic as they first appear however.
One of the many missteps that plagued The Haunting of Bly Manor was the decision to set it vaguely in the present day but still choosing to have the children speak as if they were Dickensian chimney sweeps. That was clearly informed by the performances of the child actors here, the difference being that the Victorian setting is more suitable for their old fashioned cadence. Both Stephens and particularly Pamela Franklin as Flora toe the line perfectly between celestial benevolence and unsettling overfamiliarity, which means when the twist finally arrives in the third act, it is earned rather than forced.
The Innocents is not all about the eponymous children however, Deborah Kerr is excellent as the unravelling stooge at the centre of Peter Quint’s deranged plot and Megs Jenkins provides the perfect foil to Kerr’s wide eyed panic as the all-knowing housekeeper Mrs Grose.
Over the years, The Innocents reputation has perhaps diminished due to the incredible amount of imitators that have followed grimly in its wake, but when it comes to haunted house stories, the original is also one of the best.