A group of psychics, scientists and interested parties assemble at the notorious Hill House, a sprawling mansion seemingly composed of spatial and temporal distortions (its internal geography is deliberately and unnervingly confusing).
One of the first truly great haunted house films, which created a template from which films are still being struck today.
#Where was the innkeepers filmed movie
With The Innocents now available on BFI Blu-ray, here are 10 more definitive examples of the haunted house movie to send a shiver down your spines. The children are clearly odd but are they really the destructive, corrupting force that Giddens comes to believe they are or just the product of a far from satisfactory upbringing? The answers are as elusive – and potentially as unsettling – as the ghosts that haunt Giddens’ imagination. She herself is forced to admit that “sometimes one can’t help imagining things.”Įach of the recommendations included here is available to view in the UK.Īs Giddens psychologically unravels, it becomes less clear what the greatest threat to the children in The Innocents really is – the supposed ghosts of Quint and Jessel (who, tellingly, no-one but Giddens ever sees) or Giddens’ paranoia over what she believes they may have done to them. It’s returned to many times throughout the film as other characters (including the children) question events that Giddens is certain about. We come to question how much of what we’re seeing is really the fault of the supernatural forces that Giddens believes are stalking this country estate and how much stems from her own damaged psyche. The question seems throwaway at first but becomes more pertinent as the film proceeds. It’s asked of new governess Miss Giddens ( Deborah Kerr), a study in sexual repression who will come to believe that her two young wards ( Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin) have been corrupted by the ghosts of their previous governess, Miss Jessel, and her abusive lover Quint ( Peter Wyngarde). “Do you have an imagination?” asks Michael Redgrave’s selfish uncle in the opening scene of The Innocents (1961), Jack Clayton’s definitive screen adaptation of Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw.
The Innocents is available on BFI DVD and Blu-ray.
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