Last year, the queen of gothic Americana, Shirley Jackson, got two Hollywood adaptations: one quite faithful, one not so much. Now, it looks like it’s Henry James‘ turn. His 1898 horror novella The Turn of the Screw is the source of not one, but two upcoming adaptations. The first is season two of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, now called The Haunting of Bly Manor. The other is the Floria Sigismondi movie The Turning, which dropped its trailer on Wednesday.
Unlike the movie adaptation of Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Turning keeps the main premise and characters but transposes everything to the present day. In this version of The Turn of the Screw, Mackenzie Davis plays a brand-new nanny named Kate, whose first-ever assignment is to look after two orphans, Flora (Brooklynn Prince) and Miles (Finn Wolfhard), on their sprawling, scary-chic Maine estate. While Flora takes to her new caregiver (“maybe”), Miles seems hell-bent on making her life as difficult as possible, grinding pet koi under his boots, saying spooky shit like “keeping your lights on won’t keep you safe,” and playing his drums at her in a highly aggressive and super obnoxious manner.
But is Miles the real POS here, or is it whatever’s giving her visions of a white-clad woman drowning in the water and sending disembodied hands (!) to crawl all over her back?
The Turning premieres in theaters January 24, 2020.
