Haunted House Style
On The Innocents, The Others and the postmodernism of gothic horror cinema

The following contains spoilers for The Innocents and The Others, both of which are recently featured in our list of the 50 best ghost movies.
The opening of 1961’s The Innocents is pitch black, a pool of secrets and spirits. A little girl’s voice comes from the shadows and sings, “We lay my love and I, beneath the weeping willow / But now alone I lie and weep beside the tree.” The little lullaby—a faux Victorian song that has the additional utility of bringing up death with children—sets the mood, seeming to, like much of the film’s sound design, echo through the haunted house hallways in which we are lost. Its placement at the very top of the film, before the studio logos or the main title credits, is crucial: It helps establish not only the film’s atmosphere, but the idea that The Innocents is, like the best of its gothic kind, about haunted houses and ghosts as historical texts.
Derived from the Gothic literature of the 19th century, itself a response to the formal realism that had taken hold at the time, Gothic horror cinema includes many of the trappings of its literary origins (dank houses, doomed romances), but, with the added visuality of film, can more aptly approach a conceptual understanding of the haunted house—not just a vehicle for restless spirits, but an actual text, like a book or a movie, to be studied by the people in the story itself. The Innocents perfected this, merging the anxieties of its protagonist with narrative ambiguity by way of subjective storytelling—released 50 years later, Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others tries to invert the haunted house story while maintaining its postmodern affect. On the heels of that film, the adaptation of Sarah Waters’ neo-Gothic novel The Little Stranger, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, explores how Gothic cinema functions as self-reflexive, helping us understand our own obsessions with narrative and identity.
Based on both Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw and William Archibald’s stage adaptation—which would serve as an even more crucial source text—The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton, simmers with dread and psychosexual charge. The original James novella was long used in academia to study New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary circles, as an exemplar of how ambiguity could be used in literature, and much of Clayton’s task was set on translating the precise opaqueness of the story and articulating the entrancing beauty of James’s language to the screen. In came Truman Capote, whose additions to Clayton and Archibald’s script imbued it with its iconic subtext about repression and Freudian sexual latency.
But Capote, Clayton and Archibald seemed to be aware that the draw to The Innocents wasn’t just the looming question of whether or not Deborah Kerr’s governess was really mad or whether or not the ghosts really did exist, but the power that the house in and of itself had over the characters. The story of a young woman who has come to take care of two orphans, Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin), in a remote house at Bly (while their uncle ignores them back in London and abroad) has all the workings of a fiendishly clever ghost story and chamber drama. As Miss Giddens (Kerr) becomes more paranoid, her subjective experience cleverly conveyed by reaction shots as opposed to just the apparitions she sees, it’s as if the house closes in on her.