The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)

One of the masters of the subtle, quiet horror Charles L. Grant championed through the 1980s, wrote his most famous ghost story almost one-hundred years before Grant started publishing his anthologies. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, perhaps due to its quiet and ambiguous nature, stands as a monolithic tale, perhaps the most literary of ghost stories. Most of James's novels and stories, other than perhaps Daisy Miller are read today almost exclusively by academics and lit-snobs, but The Turn of the Screw, a novella-length tale, has been popularly adapted for the stage and screen and remains a well-read classic.

As with many other Victorian stories and novels, especially those dealing with ambiguous supernatural events, The Turn of the Screw starts with a framing device integral to the believability, or at least the suspension of disbelief, necessary for such an otherworldly tale. The reader experiences the story of a young governess on an English countryside estate through the lens of a man listening to a friend's tale in an old house on Christmas Eve, beside a roaring fire, in the tenuous comfort of both temporal and physical distance from the tale itself. Unfortunately, James drops this frame completely when the friend starts reading the governess's journal to his audience. The governess, new to her position, at first admires her charges, a ten-year-old boy named Miles and a somewhat younger girl named Flora, for their intelligence and affection. Through a series of minor transgressions the children begin showing themselves as masters of the crumbling estate, visiting with what the governess thinks are ghosts. The children deny the existence of the ghosts, and no one sees them but the governess. Somehow, James creates such startling scenes of haunting, completely motionless almost, the reader does not question the power of the governess's experiences. The first ghost, the estate's dead young chauffeur, appears atop one of the mansion's tall asymetrical towers and stares down upon the governess. The simple expressionless figure creates such a huge sense of tension, the presence of a stranger on the estate becomes an iconic image of horror and invasion the way Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls (1979) uses the phrase 'Have you checked the children?' as an opaque, yet chilling incitement to panic. The remainder of the tale deals with the governess fighting with the stone-faced, far too intelligent children about the existence of the ghosts and their strange sense of rebellion. Miles especially shows himself to be a sociopath in his dealings with the outside world. Of course, the reader receives all of this information from the governess's perspective, so the question of an unreliable narrator is always present in all characterizations.

The Turn of the Screw's influence on subsequent horror stories is less evident in ghost tales and more apparent in novels and films of childhood evil and deviance. James's portrayal of Miles and Flora as eerily perfect, intelligent yet wholly sinister children found a home in a more overtly supernatural novel, John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) which was adapted for film as Village of Damned in 1960 and 1995. There's something inherently creepy about a child who has the bearing and manipulative powers of an adult and the self-awareness to place him or herself in the larger world and the vocabulary to explain all of this to his or her keeper. James mastered this without resorting to any definite supernatural elements, but his depiction of children spills over into such occult masterpieces as Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971).

Here's a fun comparison of four filmed versions of Quint at the window.