Skip to content
What became of it

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James · first published 1898

Fifteen screen versions and an opera, and no two of them agree on what happens.

16 versions · 1954–2020 · screen, stage

Britten’s opera of 1954 is the rare adaptation that keeps the thing that makes the original difficult: it does not settle whether the ghosts are there. Most film versions do settle it, in one direction or the other, and lose the argument the story exists to have.

Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) is the one usually named as the best, and it is a film about a woman’s mind rather than about a haunting. James gives you a governess’s written account, a frame narrator who half-doubts it, and no way out.

Two Young Children with a Basket of Flowers
Two Young Children with a Basket of Flowers · Emma Soyer · 1836 — a plate from our edition
The moment

1898, when ghosts were being investigated

The Society for Psychical Research had been founded in 1882 and was seriously collecting and testing accounts of apparitions; James’s own brother William was a member and later its president. Educated people were arguing about whether the dead could be seen, and doing so with statistics.

James wrote a story that cannot be settled either way, at the exact moment when settling it looked possible. The ambiguity is not a trick of ours in retrospect; it was the live question of the decade.

On screen

15

Film and television, earliest first.

  • 1959 The Turn of the Screw John Frankenheimer
  • 1962 The Innocents Jack Clayton
  • 1974 Le tour d'écrou
  • 1974 The Turn of the Screw Dan Curtis
  • 1985 Turn of the Screw Eloy de la Iglesia
  • 1994 The Turn of the Screw Rusty Lemorande
  • 1995 The Haunting of Helen Walker Tom McLoughlin
  • 1999 Presence of Mind Antoni Aloy
  • 2006 In a Dark Place Donato Rotunno
  • 2009 The Turn of the Screw Marco Serafini
  • 2009 The Turn of the Screw Tim Fywell
  • 2015 Through the Shadow Walter Lima, Jr.
  • 2016 The Tutor Iván Noel
  • 2020 The Turning Floria Sigismondi
  • 2020 The Turn of The Screw Alex Galvin

On stage

1

Opera, musical theatre and ballet made from it.

  • 1954 The Turn of the Screw Benjamin Britten

Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.