Horror Classic The Turn Of The Screw Gets New Adaptation

The recent success of Mike Flanagan's Netflix riff on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House has clearly sent rival platforms crambling for comparable projects. Here then is the news that the Disney/ABC pay-TV service Freeform has snapped up Henry James' chilling classic The Turn Of The Screw for similar treatment. Alexandra McNally (Under The Dome) and Josh Berman (Drop Dead Diva, CSI) will both exec-produce, with McNally also writing.

James’ 1898 The Turn Of The Screw sees a governess takes charge of two creepy children who appear to be being haunted by previous incumbents of their rackety estate. But there's a crucial ambiguity: are the children really in danger from ghosts, or from a sort of supernatural Munchausen-by-proxy stemming from their hysterical guardian? The answer’s up to your personal interpretation; readers have been arguing the point for 120 years.

It's been adapted multiple times before, most notably as Jack Clayton's The Innocents in 1961, and most recently by the BBC in 2009. Michael Winner directed a prequel film, The Nightcomers, in 1971, which starred Marlon Brando and Thora Hird. No, really.

This new version takes the form of "a twisty Gothic soap reimagined for modern times". It updates the setting to "the idyllic Bainbridge Island", and makes the protagonist over as "a Mexican-American nanny who is hired to care for the two children of a widowed-father at their summer home".

"The Turn of the Screw is one of the scariest novels of all time. Yet the themes are as relevant today as they were more than a century ago," says Berman. There's no announced cast or air date so far.

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