The Innocents

The best ghost film ever made in Britain and it never once tells you whether there are ghosts.

Jack Clayton adapts The Turn of the Screw with a screenplay Truman Capote worked on, and the achievement is that both readings hold for the entire running time. Miss Giddens is either seeing the dead or is a repressed woman projecting onto two children, and every piece of evidence works for both.

Freddie Francis shot it in CinemaScope with candles as the only practical light and deep-focus compositions that hide figures in the far background. Several of the apparitions are placed where you may not notice them, which means the film frightens different people at different moments.

Deborah Kerr thought it was the best work she did.

The opening, on black, with a child singing before the studio logo has cleared, is still one of the most unnerving minutes in the genre.