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HomeNewsSportBusinessInnovationHealthCultureArtsTravelEarthAudioVideoLiveWeatherNewslettersThe endless horror of ghost story The Turn of the Screw9 October 2020ShareSaveNeil ArmstrongFeatures correspondentShareSave

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Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor is the latest adaptation of Henry James’s Victorian chiller about a troubled governess. Why does it continue to terrify us so, asks Neil Armstrong.

Stephen King called it one of “the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years”, Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn says it is “one of the most chilling ghost stories ever”, and its own writer was so frightened on rereading it that he was afraid to go to bed. 

Ever since its publication, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, about a governess attempting to protect two young children from evil ghosts in an isolated country house, has terrified and shocked readers and, in recent decades, it has proved catnip to screenwriters. One new screen version, The Turning, was released earlier this year and another is in development for streaming platform Quibi, while today sees the launch of a hotly-anticipated adaptation on Netflix.

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The Haunting of Bly Manor updates James’s story, published in 1898, to the 1980s. It is director Mike Flanagan’s follow-up to The Haunting of Hill House, his acclaimed version of the Shirley Jackson book, which is the other “great novel of the supernatural” that King was referring to in Danse Macabre, his 1981 study of the horror genre.

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In the promotional material for his new series, Salem-born Flanagan says The Turn of the Screw is “in the genetics of so many of the films that I love and in so many of the authors that I love…You can see how Stephen King wouldn’t be Stephen King without Shirley Jackson and how Shirley Jackson wouldn’t be Shirley Jackson without Henry James.” In the Netflix show, the governess – or au pair as she now is – is battling demons of her own when she lands the job of looking after the youngsters, whose odd behaviour at the big old house becomes increasingly disturbing.

The real-life inspiration

James, an American living in England, got the idea for his novella from a tale told to him one winter evening by no less an authority on the afterlife than the leader of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Edward White Benson was the father of James’s friend, EF Benson. It was during a visit by James to the Archbishop’s home on 10 January, 1895, that His Grace told the writer, as he noted in his journal, a story of “young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country-house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children.” (In his book A Natural History of Ghosts, Roger Clarke makes a case for the tale told to James by the Archbishop, who had founded a ghost society while at university, being that of Hinton Ampner – a house that was the scene of an infamous 18th-Century haunting known within clerical circles.)

It’s a book that is perfect for continual reimagining. Each era will emphasise what it most fears – Dara Downey

From this raw material, James came up with a story that is presented as the written account of a now-dead unnamed narrator. She is engaged to be governess to two angelic orphans, 10-year-old Miles, currently at boarding school, and eight-year-old Flora, by their uncle at Bly, a remote manor house in the south of England. Miles is expelled from school for some unknown transgression. The young governess soon realises that the seemingly innocent children are communing with two ghosts, whom she sees around the house and its grounds. The ghosts are those of her predecessor Miss Jessel and Jessel’s lover, the malevolent Peter Quint, a valet. There are heavy hints that the pair had a profoundly inappropriate relationship with the children – sexual abuse is one interpretation. Our increasingly agitated narrator attempts to protect them from the spirits but tragedy ensues. The governess’s account is introduced in a preface as being told to a group of friends at a country-house party by the man to whom she had entrusted her manuscript years earlier.

James, keen to shake off his failure as a playwright – a few days before he met the Archbishop, one of his plays had been jeered on its opening night – and anxious to make some money, made the story as terrifying as he could. Indeed, he told his friend Edmund Gosse that when he read the proofs “I was so frightened that I was afraid to go upstairs to bed”. He achieved the desired effect. One reviewer thought it “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read”. Another warned that the book was not suitable to be given as a gift.

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It didn’t take critics very long to realise that it is only the highly-strung governess who sees the ghosts. The housekeeper Mrs Grose sees nothing. The children insist they can’t see anything. Might it all be in her mind?

The story’s endless mysteries

“The ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw goes way beyond ‘are the ghosts real or not?’,”  says Dara Downey, a lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin and editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. “Once you start reading it, you realise that nothing in it is really clear – who the governess is, where she’s writing from, what she sees, why she thinks what she thinks about the children, what happens at the end, what we’re meant to take from the story, what those men in the room hearing the story think of it, and so on. 

“In the 1908 Preface to the New York edition, James says that he wants to make the reader ‘think the evil, make him think it for himself’. So, in other words, he never tells us what the ghosts might be doing or saying to the children, or what happened in the house before the governess got there, so we project our own worst nightmares onto it. The fact that James was writing around the same time as Freud makes it so tempting to read something sexual into it, but really it could be anything. The book is part of a long tradition of American gothic from the 16th Century, building on the Puritans’ fears of devils, the unknown, their own sins, witchcraft, possession, ‘Indians’ in the woods, and so on. I think this makes the book perfect for continual reimagining – each era will emphasise what it most fears.”

The story can be read in endless ways and James gives us few concrete clues as to how we should make sense of it – Edward Parnell

Among those who have been inspired by The Turn of the Screw is Edward Parnell, the author of Ghostland, a memoir revolving around hauntings and ghost stories and films. “I think much of the enduring appeal of The Turn of the Screw stems from its masterful ambiguity,” he says. “The story can be read in endless ways and James gives us few concrete clues as to how we should make sense of it.

“The two children can be seen by readers as so creepy because they’re outwardly the antithesis of evil with their seeming good natures, their ‘radiant’ appearance, and their apparent innocence. And yet, if we subscribe to the new governess’s account, all of that is a sham, and actually they have been corrupted by Quint and Miss Jessel in some awful, unknown way.

“To modern readers Miles and Flora also take on an added layer of horror because we’re so used to seeing devilish, haunted children as a horror trope – take for example the blonde-haired children in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Regan in The Exorcist or Damien in The Omen to name just three.”

There have been around 30 screen adaptations of The Turn of the Screw. Perhaps the best known is The Innocents (1961), starring Deborah Kerr and with a screenplay co-written by Truman Capote and additional dialogue by Rumpole of the Bailey author John Mortimer. The film critic Pauline Kael described it as “the best ghost movie I’ve ever seen”. The Turning transported the story to New England, while Quibi’s new version will take place on an island in the Pacific North West. Meanwhile the new Netflix series is faithful to James’s setting of Essex, England. The au pair is called Dani Clayton in tribute to Jack Clayton, director of The Innocents.

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Flanagan has kept the spine of James’s novella but also draws on the author’s other less well known ‘weird fiction’. He wrote a number of short stories about the supernatural, such as The Jolly Corner and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, and they have been mined for plotlines, themes and characters. Flanagan calls the series “a Gothic romance”. There is subtle psychological horror, a bit of grand guignol, a love story and a plot strand which is an obvious nod to a well-known much-loved horror film. It’s a heady mix.

Looking ahead, it seems likely The Turn of the Screw is a horror story that will continue to exert a grip on generation after generation of film and television makers. Biographer Lyndall Gordon, author of Henry James: His Women and his Art, says it’s not hard to see why. “It’s striking that while Henry James was a failure in writing for the stage, he’s turned out to be wonderful for the screen and especially the smaller screen, and the answer may be obvious – that he’s an explorer of the interior life and therefore suited to the intimacy possible on screen. I [also] wonder if the moral horror of evil, especially the infection of children, is the reason for [its] enduring popularity, and that it is at once shocking and convincing.”

James’s fictional characters have now taken on a sort of life of their own. In 1968, the late author Rumer Godden moved into Lamb House in Rye, now a National Trust property but once home to Henry James. She lived there for several years and claimed that she could sometimes sense the spectral presence of two watchful children. She thought of them as Miles and Flora.

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