The Haunted House on Film Part Two

After starting last week with the piece on Fulci, I thought I would turn to another film that takes even heavier inspiration from Henry James’s novella, “The Turn of the Screw.” The Innocents, directed by arguably the most literary of British film directors, Jack Clayton, is utterly peerless.

It is formally and thematically bold in ways that are consistently surprising. The film is technically both ambitious and impressive while still, after all this time, being deeply frightening. 

While I don’t always think understanding or engaging with an adaptation requires wider knowledge of the original text, The Innocents is so faithful to Henry James that a little context is probably quite useful. So, for people who haven’t read James’s novella, it follows a governess, Miss Giddens, who is given charge of two small children called Miles and Flora, They live in a large, mostly empty house in the English countryside. The governess becomes convinced that the children are haunted. The Innocents is a deeply faithful adaptation but is heavily dependent on shifts in how James’s novella was understood. Initially, on its first publication in the late 1880s it was acclaimed as a brilliant piece of Gothic fiction – around 50 years later it was American literary critic Edmund Wilson who popularised the idea that rather than a straightforward tale of the supernatural, the plot was about subjective interiority. For Wilson, and for hosts of subsequent critics, the supernatural is really an allegorised presentation of psychological phenomena. 

This question of the psychological vs the supernatural is a theme that runs through much of the twentieth century reception of the novella and its subsequent adaptations. The Innocents was initially based on a screenplay by William Archibald, which was itself heavily influenced by his own stage play adaptation of The Turn of the Screw from the 1950s. Archibald’s play and initial draft are firmly on the side of the supernatural as real – for Clayton, this was unsatisfactory and too straightforward and he asked Truman Capote to come aboard and rework the script. Miss Giddens is young, sexually repressed and deeply anxious. The ghost of Quint is attractive and sexually domineering, violent and dangerous. The former governness, the young and beautiful Miss Jessel was obsessed with him and their erotic desire for one another was omnipresent. The children, thinks Miss Giddens, won’t somebody think of the children? She dreams and writhes at night, as the garden outside blooms, lush and decaying as, on the edge of hearing, come the screams of dying animals. 

Credit here has to be given to the film for the formal and aesthetic choices that foreground this Freudianism. Deborah Kerr as the young Miss Giddens appears as someone always-already anxious, on the edge of a psychic collapse even before arriving at the imposing Bly House. She appears hands first, revealed in darkness, praying and sobbing as she clutches a rosary and whispers about her desire to do nothing but protect children.

Clayton, alongside legendary cinematographer Freddie Francis create a series of queasy, claustrophobic frames, in which characters converse without ever looking at one another, they’re shot in odd profile or at strange angles, making every conversation rife with paranoia, leaving the viewer so uncomfortably close we can see the sweat on their brows and the tears in their eyes. The framing and cinematography make every character unreliable and the film does excellent work particularly with the two child actors. They are both immediately open and somehow completely inscrutable – Miles has an almost adult languor about him, somehow sophisticated and ultimately (for MIss Giddens at least) irresistible.  

Without spending too much time on a straightforward review the cinematography is just an unalloyed delight – light is concentrated very tightly on the center of the frame with a deep focus, creating pitch black shadows on the edge of each scene. Watching Deborah Kerr walk through the house, half her face shrouded in darkness is utterly captivating. The final formal point that has to be brought up is the constant, near obsessive use of cross dissolves which form effectively mini-montages in between scene transitions to create psychological connections and associations not just within the mind of the viewer but internally to the psychological state of the characters too. 

All of that to say, that The Innocents is an exercise in ambiguity – emphasizing the psychological supernatural over the ontological supernatural but never in a way that’s utterly decisive. There’s one moment that really drives this home. Miss Giddens goes into the schoolroom and sees the ghost of the former governess, Miss Jessel. Jessel sits at a desk and weeps, and Miss Giddens goes over. There on the desk remains a single tear that she picks up with a fingertip.  Yet all of this to say that the question of reality – are there ghosts or is this all psychological – is a false one and perhaps the least interesting way to approach the film. 

Rather, the question is, how else could things have ended for Miss Giddens? The film clearly understands the point that Foucault made about the ostensible sexual repression of the Victorians really being about the disciplinary power of a certain kind of discourse around sex. When asked by the children about her own home, Miss Giddens admits that it was very small, too small to have any secrets. A small home means secrecy – or in other words privacy – is impossible. A large home like Bly House makes secrecy not only necessary but inevitable: after all, who’s going to see anything, and even if they see, who will they tell? The house is thus a regulative and structuring architecture for the policing of desire and the preservation of an assumed innocence. 

It’s strange to watch the film now, with our own recurrent reactionary discourses of protecting children and preserving them as innocent. And now, as then the additional, often unspoken layer to this discourse of preserving and protecting innocence is the economic base that helps underpin this wider ideological apparatus. Within the film, Bly House functions as a kind of microcosm for the decaying world of late nineteenth century class society. There is an absent patriarch, who hands off the reproductive and social labour of perpetuating society to a young and easily exploited woman (“do you have an imagination” is one of the very first questions the children’s Uncle asks Miss Giddens, the ideal answer would, of course, be no). The house itself is large but outside are specters – the valet, the servant who appears at the top of the tower, the governess with the desires that are forcibly disciplined into death.

Innocence can ultimately only be preserved with death and madness revealing that beneath Miss Giddens desire to protect is an inculcated ideological cruelty. This is the true horror and tragedy of the film – it’s ending its so uncomfortably personal but at the same time a damning indictment of a societal architecture, that like Bly House itself, must be torn down.