The Innocents walks the line between psychological thriller and the supernatural, terrifying at both ends of the candle.
The fragile Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) is hired by a cold, distant uncle (Michael Redgrave) to watch over young Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin) at Bly House, his country estate, where the previous governess Miss Jessel and groundsman Quint both died. Miss Giddens learns that Miss Jessel was having an affair with Quint -- a cruel sadist -- that ended in depravity, and soon begins to suspect that the spirits of both are haunting the house. Worse, she comes to believe that the two lost souls are trying to possess the children so that they may continue their sordid relationship through them, and vows to stop them at all costs.
Few horror films have ever gotten under my skin in the way that The Innocents does. Based on Henry James’ subtly menacing 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, the film captures the ambiguity of James’ story while using stark imagery and cinematography to exude an atmosphere of corruption and rot that permeates the entire movie. When apparitions do manifest themselves, their stillness is eerie to the extreme but does nothing to allay the idea that all of this may be happening only in the crumbling psyche of the repressed governess Miss Giddens, played to perfection by Deborah Kerr. Coming two years before Robert Wise’s masterful The Haunting (1963), director Jack Clayton’s movie brilliantly walks a similar line between supernatural and psychological horrors, never letting the viewer gain sure footing on either side.
Clayton and director of photography Freddie Francis shot the film in widescreen and black and white, filling the edges of the frame with darkness that oozes around the main characters as they walk the halls of Bly House. Yet a good portion of the film takes place outside as well, in broad daylight, making in one scene the appearance of Miss Jessel on the far side of a lake terrifically haunting. This and other apparent manifestations are among the most terrifying I’ve ever seen in a film, yet somehow even worse is the malevolent way the children cruelly taunt each other and Miss Giddens, making the underlying motivation for what is happening even more perverse.
By the time The Innocents reaches the horrors of its climactic scenes, the film’s quiet intensity, brooding atmosphere and overall feeling of wrongness, are enough to make you squirm. I’ve found it hard to return to The Innocents (which recently got a deluxe Blu-ray treatment from Criterion) because of the cumulative effect that all its elements have. Without producing a single drop of blood while showing us just a hint of both violence and the otherworldly, The Innocents still manages to be a genuinely frightening experience that lingers in the senses. There is nothing innocent about this film or what happens to the people in it.
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