Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) arrives at Bly full of hope, and is charmed by little Flora (Pamela Franklin) and, later, by her brother Miles (Martin Stephens), who has just been expelled from school. The kindly housekeeper, Mrs Grose (Megs Jenkins), tells her about the previous governess, Miss Jessel, and the valet Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde), who died before she arrived.
Then Miss Giddens starts to see things: a man on the tower, a woman by the lake. The children seem to know more than they say. Is something evil possessing them, or is Miss Giddens imagining it all?
Deborah Kerr gives a brilliant performance as a woman who may be a heroine or may be falling apart. The children are unsettling, and Freddie Francis's camera fills the edges of every frame with darkness. Daphne Oram's electronic sounds add to the strangeness.
It is slow and quiet, so viewers wanting jump scares should look elsewhere. But The Innocents is a perfect ghost story: beautiful, ambiguous and genuinely chilling.
