The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. It was during a visit by James to the Archbishop’s home on 10 January, 1895, that His Grace told the writer, as he noted in his journal, a story of “young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country-house, through the death, presumably, of parents. James, an American living in England, got the idea for his novella from a tale told to him one winter evening by no less an authority on the afterlife than the leader of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury.Įdward White Benson was the father of James’s friend, EF Benson. In the promotional material for his new series, Salem-born Flanagan says The Turn of the Screw is “in the genetics of so many of the films that I love and in so many of the authors that I love…You can see how Stephen King wouldn’t be Stephen King without Shirley Jackson and how Shirley Jackson wouldn’t be Shirley Jackson without Henry James.” In the Netflix show, the governess – or au pair as she now is – is battling demons of her own when she lands the job of looking after the youngsters, whose odd behaviour at the big old house becomes increasingly disturbing. It is director Mike Flanagan’s follow-up to The Haunting of Hill House, his acclaimed version of the Shirley Jackson book, which is the other “great novel of the supernatural” that King was referring to in Danse Macabre, his 1981 study of the horror genre.

The Haunting of Bly Manor updates James’s story, published in 1898, to the 1980s.

– Lovecraft Country review: ‘ambitious and unwieldy’ One new screen version, The Turning, was released earlier this year and another is in development for streaming platform Quibi, while today sees the launch of a hotly-anticipated adaptation on Netflix. Stephen King called it one of “the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years”, Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn says it is “one of the most chilling ghost stories ever”, and its own writer was so frightened on rereading it that he was afraid to go to bed.Įver since its publication, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, about a governess attempting to protect two young children from evil ghosts in an isolated country house, has terrified and shocked readers and, in recent decades, it has proved catnip to screenwriters.

Ghost stories by henry james