The Turn of the Screw

The Turn of the Screw is an 1898 horror novella by Henry James that first appeared in serial format in Collier's Weekly magazine (January 27 - April 16, 1898). Classified as both gothic fiction and a ghost story, the novella focuses on a young governess sent to a remote country house to take charge of two orphans. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care. But is the threat to her young charges really a ghostly presence or something else entirely?

The novella has been adapted numerous times in radio drama, film, stage, and television, including a 1950 Broadway play, and the 1961 film The Innocents. Most recently, director Floria Sigismondi filmed an adaptation of the novella called The Turning on the Kilruddery Estate in Ireland.