Jack Clayton
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Most of the zealous reviews greeting the debut feature of Guillermo del Toro protégé Juan Antonio Bayona cite the latter’s influences, from The Innocents to The Others, and there’s the rub: there are far too many to allow his supernatural horror/thriller to forge its own identity.
This is a haunted-house ghost story that derives its unsettling effect from a skillfully built atmosphere of mounting dread, reaching back beyond the pop-slaughterhouse sensibilities of most current fright flicks to older films like "The Innocents" and "The Uninvited" — pictures in which a sense of the uncanny was summoned not with hacksaws and cleavers, but with a simple creak in the night.
The movie, recalling "The Innocents" and any number of children-in-ghostly-peril stories, is set almost entirely at a former orphanage on the southern coast of Spain.
Contrary to its title, The Orphanage is a movie with many forebears, starting with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents, The Others and the whole cycle of possessed child movies from the seventies and eighties, including from The Exorcist, The Omen and Poltergeist.
Hints of "Peter Pan," as well as "The Innocents," "The Others," "The Shining" and other big-old-house horror classics, float through it like ghosts on a windy night, and Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez twist them into a genuinely haunting tale.
The disappearance and the arrival of scientific ghost hunters (led by Geraldine Chaplin) are reminiscent of "Poltergeist" (1982), although Bayona more frequently strives for the rarefied psychological suggestiveness of "The Haunting" (1963) and Henry James' novella "The Turn of the Screw" (as well as its 1961 movie adaptation, "The Innocents").
Just as The Others looked to Turn of the Screw/ The Innocents as inspiration, The Devils Backbone is an homage to horror comic books, and comic books themselves play a part in the story.
With its complex characters and air of understatement, The Devil's Backbone is far different in style from the director's recent blockbuster, the gleefully ballistic Blade 2. Like Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, it harks back not only to the more restrained style of '60s horror pictures like The Haunting and The Innocents, but to 19th-century gothic-romance novels and the ghost stories of Henry James.
It most closely resembles the Henry James story "Turn of the Screw," as that one was filmed by Jack Clayton and was called "The Innocents."
Let's just say that what we have here is a delicious little ghost story that takes place within the confines of a single haunted house and recalls such minimalist classics of the genre as "The Innocents" and the original version of "The Haunting."
Perhaps the most obvious inspirations for "The Others" are Robert Wise's 1963 "The Haunting," still the greatest of all haunted-house films despite the inept 1999 remake, and "The Innocents," Jack Clayton's outstanding 1961 screen adaptation of "Turn of the Screw."
At its best, Alejandro Amenabar's "The Others" is reminiscent of "The Innocents," Jack Clayton's marvelously creepy 1960 version of Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw."
Alejandro Amenabar ("Open Your Eyes") has taken a page from "The Innocents" and created a spooky, psychological, gothic ghost story of a time gone by.
In the tradition of the most eerie vintage gothic ghost stories (think The Innocents, or The Uninvited), The Others sets the stage for chills with an isolated mansion, long dark hallways, flickering candles, and things that go bump in the night.
Watching it I was reminded of Rebecca (1940) and The Innocents (1961) in the way the location looms over the central character like a constant omen of dread.
The affectionate moments Diana shares with her adoring sons, Prince William (Jack Nielen) and Prince Harry (Freddie Spry), briefly take on spooky candlelit overtones of Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents.”
Crimson Peak (2015)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
influenced by The Innocents (1961)
Themes Visuals
Bursting with references both literary and cinematic, this is del Toro’s “The Age of Innocence” by way of Jack Clayton’s “The Innocents,” as brazenly over-the-top as those films were subtle, manifesting a ghost story in which Wasikowska’s Edith Cushing has far more to fear from the living than from the dead, and the female of the species is deadlier than the male.
Imbued with the aesthetic and tonal spirit of bombastic, luxuriantly-coloured, oft-melodramatic Euro-horrors of the 1960s (think the films of Mario Bava or Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe adaptations), Crimson Peak also has a dash of The Innocents (and thus The Turn of the Screw ) and specific Hitchcocks ( Rebecca and Psycho ) in its lush blood, as well as a bit of Brontë – a good chunk of the story could be interpreted as Jane Eyre with more literal ghosts.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
influenced by Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
Music
He builds on his already memorable Harry Potter theme with a dark tune called "Something Wicked This Way Comes".
"Something wicked this way comes," chants the Hogwart's choir in a number that foreshadows a darker, more precarious future for Harry and his friends.
Better films in this vein are (Robert Wise's) The Haunting, The Others, The Changeling (from which The Conjuring steals a gag), and, my personal fave of them all, The Innocents.
What used to be so beautifully easy in The Haunting or House on Haunted Hill or The Innocents became a little bit tougher in The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist — and nowadays you have to break out the video camera if you want to dazzle a young audience with your Paranormal Activity and your Grudge-inspired phantoms.
Frequently, the screenplay by another newbie, Sergio G. Sanchez, seems like it's merely a compendium of stellar moments from other horror hits: In addition to Pan, there are elements that strongly recall The Devil's Backbone (also by del Toro), The Others, The Innocents, The Omen and – I hesitate to add – Friday the 13th.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
Directed by Julian Schnabel
influenced by The Innocents (1961)
Plot
Frequently, the screenplay by another newbie, Sergio G. Sanchez, seems like it's merely a compendium of stellar moments from other horror hits: In addition to Pan, there are elements that strongly recall The Devil's Backbone (also by del Toro), The Others, The Innocents, The Omen and – I hesitate to add – Friday the 13th.
There's a scene in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio's hyperrich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less prosperous friend Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire).
Del Toro and Muschietti at their best channel Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Jack Clayton’s arty adaptation “The Innocents.”
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
influenced by The Innocents (1961)
Themes
It's found in such brilliant short fictions as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (filmed as The Innocents), Paul Bowles's Pages From Cold Point and, more recently, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, as well as horror movies such as The Bad Seed and The Omen and in real life in the James Bulger case.
Voice from the Stone (2017)
Directed by Eric D. Howell
influenced by The Innocents (1961)
Visuals Themes
And it was true that — especially in regards to Usher — like in the James tale (and the film version, 1961’s The Innocents), it wasn’t the twists of plot that left viewers spellbound, it was the remarkable way in which Corman and production designer Daniel Haller created an immersive, haunted world, where every creak and whisper hit the nerves like a dagger.
At its core, Eric D. Howell's film, based on a novel by Silvio Raffo, is a 19th-century-style psychological ghost story, a genre epitomized by Henry James' 1898 classic The Turn of the Screw, memorably filmed as The Innocents (1961).
What I have always appreciated most about the genre is its mutability and fluid boundaries, which is why I can appreciate the gruesomeness of Eli Roth’s oeuvre as well the subtle, psychological anguish of something like Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961).
As in Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) and William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), defenseless children are targeted by demonic forces.
Like the impressionable nanny in Henry James' wordy novella "The Turn of the Screw" (the basis for the 1961 movie "The Innocents"), Rebecca Hall's susceptible schoolteacher Beth could be the victim of a fervid imagination.
Like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (and thereafter Jack Clayton’s The Innocents ) , the real focus here is not the supernaturally afflicted child but the psychologically disquieted adult.
One nice irony is that Katherine Waterston, who plays Shasta, is the daughter of Sam Waterston, who played Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1974).
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
While watching, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents , Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and even Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice come to mind with the directorial duo gleefully playing off horror aficionados expectations.
McCarthy has clearly been influenced by “The Shining,” “The Innocents” and an underseen 2007 gem called “1408” with John Cusack as another writer with bad luck at picking hotels.