Name: How To Adapt A Classic Horror Story
Uploaded: 2026-01-17T17:24:38.000Z
Duration: 7 min 32 s
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In Henry James Classic 1898 novella the Turn of the Screw, a young woman travels to a manor house in the English countryside to assume the role of governess to two orphaned children.

Advanced passive voice

first pleased with the house and the children, the governess soon begins to see two ghosts around the property and gradually becomes convinced that the children are being possessed and corrupted by them.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

This conviction drives her into a state of heightened parenting paranoia and fear, which in turn scares the children.

The novella ends in tragedy when the governess aggressively, perhaps violently, confronts the young boy about the supernatural visitor, and

The question is, what actually happens in the Turn of the Screw?

Are the ghosts real, or do these evil visitors exist only in the mind of the governess?

Either the children are being possessed by evil spirits, or they're being tormented by their caregiver who's having a nervous breakdown.

Critics have debated this question ad nauseam, but

the general consensus today is that this ambiguity is the point.

James intended for us not to know the answer, crafting the story carefully to trap us in uncertainty.

This uncertainty is characteristic of what Svetan Todorov called fantastic fiction.

The essence of the fantastic is hesitation between a supernatural explanation of events and a rational one.

In the case of ghost stories, this hesitation can intensify the feeling of terror in the reader.

It's scary if the children are being possessed.

It's scary if they're being tormented by a hallucinating governess.

But a total lack of explanation is scarier than both.

We turn to stories for closure, for a version of reality that is tidier than our own.

When stories fail to provide explanations, we're unsettled.

In the case of the Turn of the Screw, both readings are fully consistent with the text.

How would you capture this hesitation in a movie?

That was the challenge Jack Clayton took on when he directed the Innocents in 1961, a stellar adaptation of James novella starring Deborah Carr.

He believed wholeheartedly in preserving the ambiguity of the story.

But a filmmaker's tools are different from a novelist's.

James had the power of writing in the first person, for example, which is a crucial element for most fantastic stories.

According to Todorov, the narrator experiences the uncertainty themselves, and

through the use of person, the reader puts themselves in their mind.

Movies, of course, have voiceover, which can approximate first person.

But in a visual medium, it's not really an ideal solution.

Instead, you can do what you just saw on screen.

Notice how the camera moves With Deborah Carr through the landscape, this is the case all throughout the film.

Incredible dolly and crane shots by cinematographer Freddie Francis follow the governess in sweeping oners through the house and across the grounds.

This is a visual way to capture first person narration.

We are literally with her through the story.

And through Deborah Carr's eyes, the children do appear to be somewhat creepy.

Through her eyes, the house does take on a spooky quality, like it's concealing a secret.

It's a testament to Francis brilliant work that he makes this enormous estate feel claustrophobic.

One way he did this was by hand painting glass camera filters with black on the edges to enclose the governess and darkness.

These techniques do a great job of transferring the governess's suspicions to the audience.

But at a certain point in the story, we need to become suspicious of the governess too, in order to preserve that ambiguity.

As she becomes more sure that the children are possessed, we need to feed feel less sure of her.

Well, here's one way that Clayton does that.

The second time the governess sees the male ghost, she's playing hide and seek with the children.

When the apparition glides toward her from outside the window.

She goes outside to check and when she returns, Clayton places her in the exact same spot where the ghost appeared.

Later in the classroom, the governess turns to see the female ghost crying at the desk and she walks over.

She sits at the desk and the housekeeper finds her in the same place where the ghost was.

similar framing, Clayton and Francis find visual ways to equate the governess with the ghosts.

By the end, the governess has a strong conviction that the ghosts are real.

But our conviction has been only become weaker when it reaches those final scenes.

It seems to me that she has in fact gone mad.

Something that reflects Carr's incredible unhinged performance.

Looking back on the story, I see that all those things that seemed creepy about the children are actually perfectly within the realm of normal behavior.

And probably would have seemed so if I wasn't locked into Carr's perspective.

At the very last moment in the finale, when the governess is forcing the boy to admit that he sees the ghost, Clayton for the very first time inserts a shot from the point of view of the ghost looking down on the governess and the boy.

Does this mean that the spirit is actually the one who made murders the boy?

Or does he die from the governess smothering him?

Unfortunately, I'm afraid we'll never know.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

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