Editorials
‘The Innocents’ and Horror’s History of a Fragile Mind
Henry James is a literary great who’d developed a reputation for penning atmospheric and emotionally gripping ghost stories. Though he’d written many, his most famous by far is his 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw. James preferred style was unconventional, supernatural hauntings that were extensions of reality. The haunting at Bly Manor was steeped in ambiguity, so much so that it remains wide open for many different interpretations. This is why the novella has been the subject of numerous adaptations over the years. 2020 offers two varying takes alone; The Turning and Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor. So far, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents remains the gold standard of adaptations, though.
Opening on Christmas Eve, as many classic ghost stories do, an unknown narrator listens to a friend read a manuscript from a former governess. He provides introductory details before diving into the reading; a handsome and wealthy bachelor is the guardian of his orphaned niece and nephew but prefers to leave them in the care of a governess so he can continue his bachelor lifestyle away from the country home. When the previous governess dies, he hires an attractive but unqualified woman — the narrative shifts to the new governess’s point of view as she relays her eerie tale.
The governess is immediately smitten by the youngest child, Flora, and bonds with the maid Mrs. Grose. Flora’s brother, Miles, returns home soon after due to school expulsion under mysterious circumstances. It coincides with the governess seeing apparitions of a man and woman, separately, on the grounds of the country estate — the ghosts of the former governess, Miss Jessel, and Quint, a former valet. Frightened by their appearances, the governess surmises the spirits are after the children, who’ve been behaving strangely. Fearing they’re being possessed, she’s determined to save their souls.
There’s nothing straightforward about the narrative. The ending is abrupt and without a concise explanation. James keeps things intentionally vague and enigmatic, and one of the most common reads is that the governess is an unreliable narrator crumbling under the weight of her repressed sexuality. That the ghosts, manifestations of her delicate state of mind, represent unrestrained sexuality. The Innocents makes the subtext of these themes much more explicit.
From the outset, director Jack Clayton (Something Wicked This Way Comes) and writers William Archibald and Truman Capote paint the governess, Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), as fearful and delicate. She’s overwhelmed and worried when her employer, the bachelor uncle, leaves her to her duties with instructions that she has supreme authority; and to never bother him at all. While James’ novella implied a creepy sexual attraction between Miles and Miss Giddens, Clayton makes it more overt. Though filmed with stunning gothic style, and delivering one of horror’s greatest scares via ghostly encounter, it’s clear that we’re meant to question Miss Giddens’ fragile mind. The more the ghosts of Bly Manor’s past appear, the more frenzied she becomes.
The fragile mind is a common motif in horror. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca followed a woman struggling to adjust to life as a newlywed, finding herself haunted by her husband’s previous wife. It was an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the same name, with a modern update heading to Netflix sometime this year. Just four years after the release of The Innocents, Roman Polanski made his debut with Repulsion, which centers around a woman so repulsed by sexuality that she’s driven to hallucinogenic madness. In between the two was The Haunting, a classic horror film that saw its lead, Nell (Julie Harris), susceptible to the ghosts of Hill House due to her psychological fragility.
Poor Jessica checks out of a mental hospital, only for voices and apparitions to call her sanity into question once more in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. The Entity, though not subtle in the least, saw a woman being sexually tormented by an unseen demon, causing her soundness of mind to come into question by everyone around her. More recently, a single mother drowning in grief saw her fragile state of mind manifest a physical haunting in the form of The Babadook.
The nature of this type of horror, of haunted heroines with fragile minds, presents a psychological element that sets up a central driving mystery; is it all in the narrator’s mind, or is there a supernatural presence? More importantly, it’s the core foundation to build upon what horror does best, which is to reflect our current societal or personal fears. For James’ novella, it’s been speculated that the themes of repressed sexuality possibly reflected the author’s repressed attraction to men. In The Haunting, Nell was susceptible to Hill House because of her isolation in caring for an oppressive and invalid mother. Something that caused her to suppress her thoughts, dreams, and desires.
Horror’s exploration of the fragile mind, especially in the case of James’ novella, makes for a blank canvas ripe for reinterpretation again and again. We can expect Mike Flanagan to take loose artistic liberties with The Turn of the Screw for Bly Manor, as he did with Shirley Jackson’s source material for The Haunting of Hill House. What’s less clear is how Floria Sigismondi will approach the source material for The Turning. The choice to set the film in the ‘90s is an interesting one. Will this be a straight forward supernatural haunting? Or an unraveling psychosis of Mackenzie Davis’ lead character?
The interesting thing about James’ original story is that it can go anywhere.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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