The Innocents

Director: Jack Clayton
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Michael Redgrave, Pamela Franklin, Martin Stephens
Genre: Horror 1961
Running time: 100 mins. 
Rating:★★★★

A chilling adaptation of Henry James' novella, The Turn of the Screw,  is one of the most frightening films ever made. Set in the nineteenth-century England, this gothic ghost story centers around a governess (Deborah Kerr) taking care of two orphans in a foreboding Victorian mansion. As eerie apparitions appear and the children's behavior becomes strange, the governess begins to wonder about the fate of the previous governess and her sadistic lover.

Those children are so innocence, they're sinister and unremorseful! They know how to turn the charming button just as easily as how to turn the eery button. An obsession with violence and death while able to have a convincing front of playfulness. Their new governess (Deborah Kerr) has so much unconditional love to give to these kids, but when strange occurrences begin, she suspects and fears something supernatural. You wonder, as she does, what influence her predecessor and lover has over the children, beyond their death? How alone is the governess in piecing together this horrific mystery? Entering the souls of the children and possessing them is the only way for the two deceased to be together thats a haunting thought. Eek!

Once heard that the use of white; whether clothing, animals, or flowers; that is an invitation or an indication of blood, horror, and violence to come. This film, for sure, plays on that. The slow transitions from one scene to the next to the point of transparency, allows for the evil more spine-chilling. The use of the candle stick being the only source of light is well done for you, like Kerr's character, is unsure of what is lurking around the corner. Lastly there is nothing creepier that the echo of two children, in unison, laughing in a large building.