I have a better than usual reason for not remembering the podcast categories, I mean aside from how I watched the movie days ago and have not yet reviewed it. See, their style was 1960s, okay, sure, but their scare was wildcard, which functionally means “pick a horror movie from the 1960s.” And they did!, but you can see why that would be hard to explicitly remember.

Anyway, the movie they settled on (from a group of 6 and then selected randomly) was The Innocents, a Victorian era ghost story[1] based we think on Henry Miller’s The Turn of the Screw, a book I nearly read once. I wonder if in 1961 a movie with a Victorian setting would have been considered a period piece, or if that bit of genre definition did not yet exist.

A nanny, or “governess” as the British would have us believe, is hired to nannify two orphaned children on a massive English estate off in the countryside, because the uncle who inherited them has no interest in children. So off she goes, to find a mostly empty house except for the cook and the maid and the daughter and, before long, the son. Only, there are weird sounds and musics and people up on the tower who shouldn’t be there, and before long the nanny thinks there might be ghosts around.

And then before much longer than that, she thinks the children might be possessed. And then, it’s time for a spoiler cut, because stopping here would be extremely unsatisfying for me, but reading further could potentially be unsatisfying for you.

[1] maybe?

So last year, gossips the maid (or maybe the cook; one of them, for sure, the older one), when the somewhat villainous valet of the dead parents was in charge of the estate, the previous nanny and he fell in love, or maybe lust, but either way it was not a healthy relationship, and before long and in an uncertain order, she drowned herself in the lake and he slipped on the outside stairs during an ice storm and hit his head, and both of them are very dead.

And our nanny, this one I mean, not the drowned one, decides that the weirdness going on and the admittedly odd behavior of the children is down to these ghosts possessing them and forcing them to… I don’t know what exactly. Re-enact the doomed affair? They sure never say this explicitly, which you can understand given that it’s 1961 when the movie was made. But the thing is, nobody except her really believes there are spooky happenings in the first place.

The children are either innocent or possessed and messing with her (but, okay, still innocent, just on a different level). The few staff still around are either willfully disregarding the possible haunting evidences or incapable of perceiving them. The nanny herself is either the only person fully aware of what’s going on, or else for underlying reasons that elude me has really grabbed on hard to this ghost story idea to avoid facing… I don’t know what, really.

Ultimately, I’m not sure if I was supposed to take the movie at face value, that everything we see from the nanny’s viewpoint is really happening, or if I’m supposed to doubt her conclusions in a way that she herself never does. In the end, one of two things happens. Either a) the ghosts win and the children are corrupted and destroyed, or b) it was all in the nanny’s head, and she drove one of them crazy and killed the other one. It is a testament to the writing that the second possibility is more horrific while still being believable instead of cartoonish.

Or it’s a testament to my imagination, and taking the movie as an unambiguous haunting is what I was supposed to do. Shit, I don’t know, I just work here. (Arguably, this is where having ever read the book would help me decide.)