It amazes me how many children show up in horror movies they’re not allowed to see. Kids are everywhere in fright flicks. Either they’re innocent waifs running from horrific, kid-killing entities (The Shining, The Conjuring, etc.) or they’re the horrific entities themselves, bent on ridding the world of a few adults (Children of the Corn, The Ring, etc.). Sometimes, like in The Exorcist, they manage to be both.
But most of the time, we at least know whether a kid is cute and imperiled, or devil spawn, or both.
But you probably haven’t seen 1961’s The Innocents then.
The film takes place in a gigantic mansion in some bucolic corner of England. Young Miss Giddens (played by Deborah Kerr) has just been hired as a governess for the manor lord’s young nephew and niece: a precocious, sweet-mannered boy named Miles (Martin Stephens) and his adorable younger sister, Flora (Pamela Franklin). The uncle wants the kids to be well cared for, of course, but he tells Miss Giddens firmly that he has no desire to interact with them at all. “I have no room, mentally or emotionally,” he says. Anything that comes up with the children, he tells Miss Giddens, she’ll have to handle herself.
At first, Miss Giddens and the kids get along swimmingly. Sure, there’s a little hiccup when Miles returns home from boarding school unexpectedly—expelled, his teachers say, because of his bad influence on the other children. But one look at the lad, and Miss Giddens is sure that the whole thing must be a misunderstanding that they’ll square away … sometime.
But as the days roll on, Miss Giddens seems to sense something amiss at the manor—and perhaps with the children themselves. They whisper so much amongst themselves. They can seemingly be cruel to animals and even to her. Miles especially can act more “adult” than a boy his age rightfully should—even giving Miss Giddens a kiss goodnight on the lips. And the governess begins to see other figures wandering the grounds: a sinister-looking young man clothed in black; a tragic-looking woman wandering around the lake.
Eventually, housekeeper Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins) unpacks the house’s tragic backstory. Just a year earlier, a certain Miss Jessel served as the children’s governess. She was carrying on a relationship with Peter Quint, the uncle’s valet, but the romance was a stormy and abusive. Sometimes they’d be (ahem) intimate in full view of the other servants and perhaps even the children. Sometimes Quint would strike Jessel, but she always came back to him.
Then one day, Quint apparently slipped on some ice, and the fall killed him. (Mrs. Grose says she’ll never forget the look of surprise on his face.) Shortly thereafter, Miss Jessel did herself in—drowning in the lake.
As Miss Giddens hears these stories, she forms a theory—one that quickly becomes a certainty in her mind. Quint and Jessel aren’t gone, she believes. Their spirits remain … and reside, somehow, in Miles and Flora.
But is she right? Or is she a little crazy? Instead of them tormenting her, is she tormenting them?
The Innocents is a creepy classic. It currently has a 96 percent “freshness” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and no less a luminary than Martin Scorsese named it as one of the 11 scariest horror films of all time. It’s certainly no Saw or The Exorcist: There’s no blood, no gore, no real jump scenes. Rather, the black-and-white film oozes atmosphere—a sense of creepy, haunting decay and decadence. And while The Innocents definitely looks like a 55-year-old movie (that’s a compliment, by the way), its disturbing undertones of sexual weirdness, abuse and its ability to push us to a point of utter confusion as to who’s haunting whom gives it a rather modern feel.
But as you might expect, given this blog’s “watching God” focus and all, there’s a spiritual element to ponder here, too.
The movie opens with a haunting portrait of Miss Giddens praying—candlelight bouncing off her hands as she petitions God for the well-being of the children in her care. The daughter of a parson, she’s deeply religious and, perhaps, a little innocent herself in the ways of the world. In her eyes, these children are possessed—just as surely as Regan in The Exorcist is. She’s determined to rescue the children from these evil spirits by whatever means necessary.
Like Miss Giddens, we Christians feel like the world around us has been corrupted. That all too often, it steals the innocence of those we love. We want to help them. We want to save them. But sometimes, those whom we love don’t feel like they need saving. The very faith that we believe is the key to healing becomes a source of friction and schism. And there are times when we can come across as a little annoying. Maybe even a little crazy. And yet, if we’re right—that our faith can save, that it is in fact the only hope everyone has—we have to press our case, right? For the good of those we love?
The Innocents forces viewers to look at this inherently spiritual issue through both the eyes of Miss Giddens (who sees children in need of rescuing) and Mrs. Groves (who sees an unhinged governess). And we’re forced to grapple with some uncomfortable possibilities: The Christian must wonder whether Miss Giddens’ faith led her terribly astray. The secular viewer must wonder whether Miss Giddens guessed at the truth.
You don’t need to watch The Innocents with those spiritual questions in mind to enjoy it, of course. It’s a dandy movie without them. It is, if I might say, a great movie for this time of year—particularly if you like your goosebumps without the gore. But even though The Innocents doesn’t have a lot of overt content, don’t watch it with kids. The themes in play are hardly innocent.
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