Forgotten Gems: 'The Innocents' Continues to Not-So-Innocently Frighten 50 Years Later
- amandagreer22
- May 11, 2015
- 5 min read
In 1961 Jack Clayton's film, The Innocents, looked like it had all the right ingredients to become a major horror hit. In addition to having Clayton at the helm, the film starred Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave, boasted Truman Capote as an additional screenwriter, and was based on beloved writer Henry James's famous novel, The Turn of the Screw.
Sounds like they shoulda been popping champagne bottles on opening night, right?
WRONG.
Pictured: Not the cast and crew of The Innocents
Although it was a critical success, garnering two BAFTA awards, The Innocents barely drew crowds. What's more, in 2015, The Innocents holds negligible sway when compared to its horror film contemporaries, such as Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963).
Admit it. If someone were to ask you for horror movie recommendations, you would probably spout off some slasher or torture porn titles, followed by one or two "cinephiliac" productions, like Nosferatu. You pompous ass.
This is what the world sees when they look at you.
Our forgetting about The Innocents is both understandable and unbelievable. The film, which follows a young governness, Miss Giddens, who begins to suspect that her two orphaned charges have been possessed, relies more on building a feeling of tension and suspense than on quick moments of shock and gore. Since I'm a huge horror film fan, I obviously see the value of slasher movies and movements like the French "New Abject." However, I also see very clearly that suspense is becoming severely undervalued in the genre. Instead of a slow build, horror films now (for the most part, at least) go in for the kill right away. They're full of small explosions, rather than a long, long fuse leading to total disaster.
In other words, they go in for digust over dread.
That's the thing about The Innocents. Clayton sets the stage for dread right away. Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) arrives at a country estate, the sheer size of which creates a feeling of austerity and secretiveness. As she comes to know the children, the film amps up the atmosphere, giving viewers the sense that something incredibly sinister is in the works.
Pictured: Typical Day for a Governess
This feeling is due mostly to the ingenious work of cinematographer Freddie Francis and sound mixer Daphne Oram. Francis uses the black and white palette to great effect, making shadow his medium of choice. Through his clever lighting design and camera placement, characters -- especially Miss Giddens -- are often boxed in by light. This makes for some incredibly claustrophobic moments.
By boxing in these characters, Francis strips them of control and brings the audience along for this nightmarish ride. The characters cannot see into the shadows any more than the viewers can--they only know that something is lurking there. Film theorist Daniel Dayan would find that Clayton's film subverts the process of suturing, or of smoothing over/hiding cuts between shots. As a result, something called the "absent-one" is present, something that makes viewers aware that there is an invisible force organizing the film. In a more traditional film, the absent-one would be "exorcized," for lack of a better word, by aligning its gaze with that of a character in the film. In the case of The Innocents, this invisible force, the absent-one, leaks into the diegesis itself without being positioned as a character, becoming the haunting, controlling what the flesh-and-blood characters (and, by extension, the viewers) can see.
Anxiety-inducing, am I right?
Not only does Francis manipulate shadows like a goddamn magician, he uses deep focus composition in a way that was incredibly rare in 1961. For those of you who are all, "But don't you just turn a knob and make the camera focus on everything?" The answer is no. Deep focus was incredibly hard to achieve, and can still be difficult even today. You know how in most films, the background will be blurry but the foreground in focus, or vise versa? Well, that's because it's easier to keep only one plane of vision in focus than two.
As you can see above, Francis rocks this deep focus composition business. He gets a split field diopter lens effect without actually using a split field diopter lens. In other words, Francis somehow, usuaully using very little light, manages to keep the entire frame in focus.
Me watching Francis sleep, because I am obsessed with his #skills
By focusing on all of this space, Francis forces viewers to scan different shots, different rooms, different settings. The camera no longer directs the eye, making it terribly frightening when something appears out of nowhere, or that feeling of dread continues to build and build.
Hopefully Francis will be remembered along with The Innocents.
Moving onto the film's soundtrack, which is equally ahead of its time, we can look at a clip of Miss Giddens looking for the source of the house's haunting.
The film's sounds are almost synesthesiac--they're visceral. This is due to Daphne Oram's use of synthesized electronic sound, which, in 1961, was an extremely new technique. She is a master of layering. At the end of the clip, when Miss Giddens spins around on a hallway landing while disembodied voices seem to swirl past her, Oram creates such a dense mix, it sounds almost like surround sound. (This was also before the advent of surround sound mixing). Not to mention her manipulation of the ghosts' laughter. She disjoints them, giving the noises an uncanny, fragmented sound that is, suffice it to say, goosebump-inducing.
Oram almost asks up to feel her sounds--they're that three-dimentionsal.
Going back to the feeling of dread vs. disgust, Oram and Clayton do a wonderful job of playing with the tension between silence and sound. Everyone knows that the anticipation of sound or movement is the scariest part of a horror film, and Clayton does it with aplomb. I don't want to give too much away, but all I'll say is watch out for the hide-and-seek scene, which manipulates silence (and a creepy music box melody) to the best of film's abilities.
Hopefully more and more people will remember The Innocents and all it has to offer the horror genre and film history in general. Technologically forward-thinking, suspenseful, and overall well-crafted, The Innocents deserves to be remembered.
Plus, it has some spooky-as-hell children, and everyone knows that those characters are the superstars of any good horror film.
"Me? Oh, nothing, just plotting your future demise."
So if you're like me, and feel like you've exhausted the horror canon and can't find and new movies that tickle your fancy, try this overlooked classic--I promise it won't disappoint.
You can find the entire movie here.
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