The Innocents (1961).

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"It's coming! It's in the trees!"

Oh. No. Wait. That's the wrong film.

But, famously, that movie had a director who wanted to leave audiences pondering whether anything supernatural was going on or if it was all in the characters' heads - until the producers decided to scupper that conceit by inserting a great big, magnificent demon into all scenes of high drama.

However, there were other films that were allowed to pull off the ambiguity trick.

And, surely, the greatest of them all is The Innocents, Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James' 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw.

In that film, a woman called Miss Giddens is hired as governess to two orphaned children in a big house in the middle of nowhere.

At first, everything seems idyllic, with the house located in beautiful environs and the girl Flora a delight.

But, after her brother Miles is expelled from his boarding school, for reasons opaque, and arrives back at the house, Miss Giddens starts to to become convinced that evil lurks in, around and behind every corner she encounters and that the spirits of dead servants Peter Quint and Mary Jessel are haunting the place and taking possession of the children.

For these were no ordinary servants. If the housekeeper Mrs Grose is to be believed, there was a serious air of the Heathcliff and Cathy about them, with acts of violence, cruelty, drunkenness and sexual depravity being carried out at every possible opportunity.

Can our heroine do anything to drive out those evil spirits?

She thinks so and sets out to do so.

But are there any ghosts?

Is she really a well-meaning woman trying to save two children from supernatural terror? Is she, instead, a sexually repressed woman carried away by fantasies stifled by Victorian ideas of propriety? Or is she simply a pervert concocting justifications for her unhealthy attraction to a young boy?

We never find out.

As well as its lighting, visual symbolism, and its impeccable cinematography by Freddie Francis, the film is distinguished by its cast which, apart from its first scene, effectively consists of just four actors. Deborah Kerr giving what she felt was her greatest ever performance, as the increasingly monomaniacal governess. Megs Jenkins as exposition engine Mrs Grose who believes the best way to deal with uncomfortable things is to ignore them. And Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin as the children - with Stephens, in particular, giving a potent performance as an unnervingly adult boy, a feat he'd also pulled off in Village of the Damned.

With its labyrinthine corridors that must only ever be lit by clusters of candles, tension stretches tight across the house. Wanting to create an air of claustrophobia, director Clayton was horrified when ordered to shoot the movie in wide-screen CinemaScope but deftly turned that to an advantage, filling the edges of the frame with dark nooks, crannies and occasional hints of movement, to create the feeling that something could leap out at us at any moment.

Sound is also expertly manipulated, with repeated use of the song O Willow Waly - which we somehow recognise as a song we all grew up with, even though it was written specially for the film - while electronic sound effects by Daphne Oram and incidental music by Georges Auric and W. Lambert Williamson add to the mood.

The production also features a role for future Jason King star Peter Wyngarde as the late Peter Quint who never speaks but manages to loom out of the darkness whenever required.

Likewise, Clytie Jessop gets nothing at all to do but sit at a desk and stand ominously by a lake, as the possible ghost of Mary Jessel.

Overall, with William Archibald and Truman Capote's taut screenplay, its stylish lighting, lush cinematography, outstanding cast and enough ambiguity to keep you in arguments forever, The Innocents raises the genre of horror to the level of high art and is easily as imperishable as its servants.