Henry James’ 1898 ghost story, The Turn of the Screw is famous for the ambiguity of its haunting. Ever since Edmund Wilson outlined his psychoanalytic reading of the text in the 1945 essay ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’, the central questions surrounding the novella have been, are the ghosts really there? Or are they inventions of the governess protagonist’s disturbed mind?

This potential for a psychologised reading is perhaps one of the reasons that Jack Clayton decided to adapt the film for screen in 1961. This was in a period in which the horror genre in Britain was changing. 1960 saw the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, both of which moved away from the ‘cosy horror’ of supernatural monsters and Gothic mansions that Hammer had been producing in the 1950s, towards a newer form of ‘paranoid horror’ in which terror emerged from everyday settings in the form of psychotic killers who appeared, at first, to be ordinary people (Hunter & British Film Institute, 2013). With this shift, horror cinema began to show the influence of what sociologist Nikolas Rose has described as, the ‘psychiatric society’ from which it grew, making the language of diagnosis, pathology and trauma its own (Rose, 1985).  It was within this context that Clayton began production on The Innocents, an adaptation of James’ novella.

Set in a Gothic mansion in the mid-nineteenth century, The Innocents doesn’t quite seem to map onto the wider genre shifts that were happening at the time. The film takes place in a world of Victorian morality that is shaped by ideas of innocence and corruption. Its story of a governess and two small children being haunted seems to share more with the works of the Bronte sisters or Ann Radcliffe than it does with Psycho. However, the film’s focus on the governess’ mental and emotional state, as well as its concern with the decline of the family and the effects of childhood trauma means that it contains more of the psychologised themes of paranoid horror than may at first be apparent.

There is one way of reading the film in which we see Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), the governess, not as a neurotic who is dogged by her own sexual repression, but rather as a psychoanalyst or therapist who is trying to get the children to confront their past trauma. Possibly abused by their former caretakers, the children’s reticence to discuss the ghosts could be a sign of buried distress, rather than Miss Giddens’ own psychosis.

At the same time, the film contains numerous images of children’s play. During this period, the inner life of children was a source of fascination and sometimes concern for parents. Dr Spock’s bestselling childcare manual (1946) by contained ideas and advice about imaginative play, seeing it as a healthy part of childhood development that, providing it didn’t go too far, should not be discouraged. In the aristocratic world of The Innocents play is a prominent part of life. The children Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens) play hide and seek with Miss Giddens, dance with imaginary partners, and they dress up and perform. However, these moments of imaginative play are often when unease or fear, or even the ghosts themselves creep into the narrative. Thus, though the film retains ideas from child psychology that see play as important, it also channels developmental psychologists’ fears that, if it goes too far or is exposed to the wrong influences, it can become dangerous.

Psychologised approaches to The Innocents have frequently focussed on the psychoanalytic significance of the ambiguity of the ghosts. However, the film bears the marks of a deep engagement with a variety of different psychologised discourses of its period. In this way, despite its period setting and supernatural monsters, the film can still be seen as part of the shift towards paranoid horror in the 60s and be counted alongside Psycho and Peeping Tom as a bellwether for the genre.