10 Horror Movies That Fill You With Dread
6. The Innocents
It wouldn’t be a ghost story without the characters questioning what’s going on around them and fearing that the laws of the universe no longer apply. The 1961 classic The Innocents manages like few other films to put that feeling onto the audience.
Jack Clayton’s still truly unsettling film stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, who is hired as a children’s governess in a country mansion. Her charges are Flora and Miles, two orphans whose uncle can’t take care of them. Miss Giddens connects with both children quickly, but something isn’t right. They’re secretive, peculiar, and somehow altogether too adult. When she learns of the tragedies that took place in the property, she quickly suspects ghostly possession.
What The Innocents does so ingeniously is never fully give the game away. There are myriad examples one can use to suggest Miss Giddens is right; equally, there’s evidence aplenty that she’s simply lost the thread.
The mysterious presentation and Kerr’s increasingly desperate performance makes it clear something terrible is going to happen, but the horror could unfold in all manner of ways, and that uncertainty grips the viewer right up to the shock ending.