The Innocents and the surprising rarity of satisfying ghost stories

Last night I finally watched The Innocents from 1961, after years of seeing praise for it from people on the internet convinced me to spring for the Criterion Collection edition.

Things did not start out well. I actually started watching it a few weeks ago, but gave up less than a half hour in, partly because using the PlayStation 5 as a Blu-ray is a drag, but also because not much seemed to be happening. The cinematography is outstanding, but even allowing for how short attention spans have gotten since the 1960s, it seemed to be inexcusably slow to get going.

Once it does get going, though, you can entirely see why the movie has the reputation it does. It is intensely creepy. The imagery is far more tame than anything you’d see in horror movies today, but is easily as effective. The sinister face of a man visible just outside a window in darkness. A woman in black standing in the reeds in the distance, just watching in broad daylight. A hand reaching up in the darkness — suggesting Miss Giddens’s devotion at the beginning of the movie and Miss Jessel’s desperation at the end.

I don’t want to be too critical of Mike Flanagan’s mini-series The Haunting of Bly Manor, since it was aimed at a different type of audience, and it was trying to do something almost entirely different. But it is remarkable to consider how much it had to go so heavy on the horror imagery, when something far simpler could be so effective.

But the real creepiness of The Innocents is in the psychological. Characters who are truly innocent, left to fend for themselves against forces they’re unable to make any sense of. Deborah Kerr is truly exceptional as a kind of unreliable protagonist who still remains entirely sympathetic. I actually wonder whether the movie works better now than it did in 1961 — I felt as if I were watching her performance with the same sense of detachment I’d give to any 60-year-old movie that was itself a period piece, all without noticing just how much Miss Giddens was losing her grip until it was too late.

A few years ago I read The Turn of the Screw, because like The Innocents it perpetually showed up on lists of the best ghost stories. And I found it impenetrable. It’s so over-written that I couldn’t make sense of it beyond the plot. People would frequently say that the mastery of it is how it leaves it ambiguous whether any of the supernatural occurrences actually happened, or whether it was all in the governess’s head. I just had to take their word for it, because I didn’t get any hint of that at all.

But with this adaptation, that ambiguity is in full force, and it’s the core of what makes this such an unsettling classic. It takes the central conceit of the ghost story — our primal fear that we don’t know what happens after we die — and expands on it to become an existential threat. It’s not just that we don’t know what happens after we die; we don’t even know why we’re here in the first place.

The governess, who’d had a very sheltered and religious fundamentalist upbringing, was dropped into this house by an employer who makes a point of stressing that she’s on her own, and he doesn’t want to be bothered. When you watch it right after the opening titles showing her hands in prayer in the darkness, it’s difficult not to see the analogy: we’ve been dropped onto Earth to fend for ourselves, by a God who refuses to talk to us.

You begin to see why a woman with such a past would cast everything in terms of good vs. evil, how hearing stories of a wicked man and “sinful” former governess would turn into thoughts about vengeful ghosts, and how she’d be unable to understand an otherwise delightful child’s misbehavior as anything other than ghostly possession.

And then the most unsettling question for anyone first forced to question their faith: what if I’m wrong? Throughout, she’s been driven by the conviction that she was doing what must be done to protect two innocent children from being possessed by the spirits of wicked adults. If that’s not the case, then her behavior crosses the line from “inappropriate” to “unspeakable.” By today’s standards, not just Victorian ones, where pretty much everything was unspeakable.

So I think The Innocents is exceptional at suggesting why ghosts are scary. But is it a good ghost story?

I’m still on the fence. Its strength is entirely in its ambiguity; if you go in with either the assumption that it’s entirely supernatural, or it’s entirely psychological, then the story is pretty slight. Either it’s a story about a couple of creepy sightings and a threat that’s mostly benign until a weird ending, or it’s a story about a devout religious woman going insane. Either version on its own would leave me feeling like there should’ve been more.

Which leaves me at a loss for thinking of any ghost stories that actually work for me like I expect them to. Even at the time of The Turn of the Screw, ghost stories were already so common as to be considered trite, and the story even describes itself (through one of its multiple narrators) as an example of raising the bar. But for a genre that’s supposedly so common, I have a hard time thinking of any great ones.

The Others is unquestionably my favorite. It’s been forever since I’ve seen it, so it might have just expanded in my head over the decades, but it was exactly what I want a ghost story to be. Not a postmodern spin, or an extended metaphor, but a good, old-fashioned story about sympathetic characters in a definitely haunted house.

Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House is up there. It definitely is an extended metaphor about families and generational trauma, but it’s never content to let the ghosts be nothing more than a metaphor.

And of course, The Shining is the evergreen example of how I have better taste than both Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King, because I like both the book and the movie. And it, too, lets ghosts be a metaphor for alcoholism and family dysfunction, but also stay ghosts.

But apart from that, I’ve read and seen so many of the books and movies that make Best Ghost Stories lists, and few have really worked for me. I’ve read The Haunting of Hill House and seen both movie adaptations, and I have to say that I just don’t get it.

I watched both The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage around the same time, and I liked them both, but Backbone isn’t strictly a ghost story so much as a Guillermo del Toro movie with ghosts in it, and Orphanage I’ve already forgotten almost entirely. Maybe this month would be the perfect time for a rewatch.

And somehow, Poltergeist has never felt like a “ghost story” to me, even though I’m at a loss to explain why, considering that ghosts are kind of its whole thing. Maybe I’m just into the idea of gothic ghost stories, or period pieces?

In any case, for a genre that has a reputation for being overused and played out, I sure have a hard time finding good ones that don’t turn into something else. Even Peter Straub’s Ghost Story felt like a perfect example of “You had one job!!!” because I’m still not entirely clear on whether its villains were technically even ghosts?

Still in the queue is Grady Hendrix’s How to Sell a Haunted House, which I honestly haven’t been that excited to get back into. And I’ve been compiling a list for recommendations of books with classic or modern ghost stories, including Whistle And I’ll Come To You, The Woman in Black, The Apparition Phase, The Little Stranger, The Whistling, and Wuthering Heights. Again, it seems like the perfect month to start reading some of them.

But ultimately, I think I’m really looking forward to another movie that worked for me as well as The Others did. I hope I find one eventually, so that it doesn’t become the unfinished business that binds me to this mortal plane.