Since its publication in 1898, Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" has absorbed our collective imaginations. It is a story that pits innocence against corruption, desire against duty, and children against ghosts. While it has been filmed over a dozen times for both the small and silver screens, not all of those adaptations have been worth watching. Listed here are eight of the most visually, dramatically, and thematically compelling adaptions of its central story. 8. THE TUR

Like the other exemplars of the five respective genres of literary horror (Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Haunting of Hill House), “The Turn of the Screw” has a fascinating genesis. Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson were both inspired by horrifying nightmares, but – typical of Henry James – the writer of the ultimate literary ghost story was motivated by a polite conversation over a crackling fire. James had suffered a staggering humiliation when one night he a

He was not one for terror, or even horror. His fiction is impressionistic, psychological, and "courtly," but it has one pervasive emotion to it: unease -- discomfort, awkwardness, and a lurking shame buried in intentional secrecy. The fear of truth. The terror of exposure, of reality and confrontation. Henry James has long been heralded as a master of transatlantic realism, a cosmopolitan observer of human nature, and a bone-dry contributor to the novel of manners – a blue-bl

The very first literary ghost story that I ever read was “The Turn of the Screw.” I had loads of books about hauntings, phantom hitchhikers, cryptozoology, and supernatural folklore, but Henry James was the first writer who engaged my intellect as well as my imagination. His most famous spook story followed a naïve (and possibly insane) young woman who was the governess to two children who were probably molested by their previous servants, and who may or may not be haunted by