A governess arrives at a country estate to care for two orphaned children, and almost immediately begins to wonder whether the house is haunted, or whether she is the one coming apart.

THE INNOCENTS (1961) stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, hired by a distant uncle, played by Michael Redgrave, who wants nothing to do with raising his niece and nephew. At Bly, she meets Flora and Miles, played by Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens, two children whose politeness seems to hide something underneath. Soon she becomes convinced that the ghosts of a former valet and governess, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, are reaching through the children toward possession.

Jack Clayton directed from a script by William Archibald and Truman Capote, adapting Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Freddie Francis shot it in wide-screen black and white, filling the frame's edges with shadow and leaving the center exposed, so that every room at Bly feels watched from somewhere just out of sight.

The film has kept audiences unsettled for over sixty years, and what it shows at Bly still separates it from nearly every haunted house film that followed it.