Another turn

The Others

(2001)

This is a first-rate scary movie, in part because it's hard to say as it goes along who's the scariest: the mostly unseen "intruders," mother Grace (Nicole Kidman), or young daughter Anne (Alakina Mann). (Anne's brother Nicholas [James Bentley] is far too wimpy to be scary, and the servants [Fionnula Flanagan, Eric Sykes, and Elaine Cassidy] are mysterious but not really scary. We won't discuss the missing-and-presumed-dead-a-couple-of-years-after-the-war father.)

A couple of minutes into this I thought, "Hey, I never thought about this when it was in the theaters, but wasn't there a film many years ago, based on Henry James's novella of the supernatural The Turn of The Screw, in which children and domestics also featured prominently?" Well, no, actually--I was thinking of The Innocents. But it turns out, according to Wikipedia, anyway, that Turn was indeed an influence cited by this film's writer-director Alejandro Amenábar.