Three interpretations...

The film is a great translation of Henry James "The Turn of the Screw". The title alone gives it away. She was mentally unbalanced as in "loose screws" or slightly "off".

when my teacher says a, major critics say b, what am i supposed to think?

Why must the questions of Miss Giddens sanity and the reality of the ghosts be mutually exclusive? It seems just as likely, and perhaps even more probable, that both are the case rather than it having to be the case of either one or the other. Early in the film Miss Giddens, while clearly not psychotic, does appear to be carrying some baggage. She needs for those children to need her - for her to be as important to them as they are to her - and almost seems bothered (maybe even jealous?) when hearing Mrs. Grose describe the attachments that Flora had to Miss Jessel and Miles to Peter Quint, respectively. Miss Giddens was haunted - either by her own insecurities and the daunting task of being as beloved by the children as Miss J and Quint - or by their actual ghosts - which surely couldn't have been healthy for a stable psyche much less a fragile one.

Miss Giddens (Miss Giddy?)is as nutty as a fruit cake. The brief sketches of her family life reveal one of a stodgy family (everyone had to be quiet while father was composing his sermons...) cramped into a small house which would have offered very little privacy. From this background this repressed and prudish young woman suddenly comes into a situation in which she is told she has 'supreme authority', it's too much for her...Miss Giddy is some kind of sexually repressed religious psycho who sees the devil in every innocent act. At the highest points of her hysteria she uses biblical language such as "cast those devils out" and most frighteningly of all, (this will haunt me forever) she tells young Miles (paraphrase) "I was brought up by my father to help people, even if they didn't want it, even if it hurt them". The woman is clearly a religious fruit.She completely misunderstands the pain that the two children have endured, they have obviously lost both their parents, their uncle doesn't care about them at all, and a part of their lives were dominated by those other 2 nut jobs Jessel and Quint. Clearly, the goerness, a young repressed woman on the edge of sexual awakening is the ghost of the house. Ultimately, it is she who is haunting the children to death. I've read James' novella, the woman is a creepy psycho.

...and you haven't yet watched "The Innocents" yet, have you?

"Oh look - a lovely spider! And it's eating a butterfly!"
'' ,,

James wrote this as a "ghost" story, and it is so convincing and detailed in it's portray of "hysterical" personalities, that we tend to interpret it today as a psychological study. But his intent was to scare. He's just too good a writer and observer that we want to make more (or less) of what happens here than actually does.

I'm not sure I'd say that the evidence is equally good for all three interpretations; but, even if we accept that it is, I have a hard time seeing how interpretation 1 (viz. that Ms. Giddens is experiencing delusions) isn't preferable to the others. Basically, it's all just Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is the best. If all three interpretations are equally consistent with the evidence, then we should go for the simplest one. And it seems clear to me that the simplest one is the one that doesn't require us to imagine either an elaborate conspiracy or supernatural forces at work. So the simplest account of what's going on is that we're seeing Ms. Giddens cracking up.

Given that nothing in the film calls out for the explanation that someone is plotting against Ms. Giddens or that there is anything supernatural at work, why would we go for explanations that have such prima facie implausibility? So let's just keep it simple.

I suppose you could object that interpretation 1 is boring, and that the story would be more interesting if we take it to be ambiguous or if we think it really does involve supernatural forces or an elaborate plot to drive her insane. I don't agree. Everything really interesting about the movie seems so closely tied to Ms. Giddens and her point of view that I don't think we lose anything by thinking of the movie as primarily an examination of her mind. The things I found interesting were the ways in which Ms. Giddens interpreted the behavior of the children, the reasons she interpreted and understood their behavior in the way she did, the effects that Ms. Giddens's thinking started to have on the people around her, the (relatively subtle) hints we had that some of the things were most likely only happening in her mind, the gradual evidence that emerged that no one around her was seeing what she saw and thinking as she thought, and the nature and intensity of her relationship with Miles. All of these things are ultimately about Ms. Giddens's and the operation of her mind, and so I don't think they become any less interesting if we think of the movie as the story of a woman slowly losing her grip on reality.

Indeed, the movie is so narrowly focused on Ms. Giddens's psychology that it would be problematic for it to really be telling a story about anything other than how she thinks and acts. Why don't we learn more about Quint and Jessel if the story is really about ghosts? Learning more information, and learning more directly, about their lives would seem necessary for an interesting and affecting story about their ghosts. If we don't know much about the ghosts, I don't think much is added to Ms. Giddens's story by knowing that actual ghosts were behind at least some of her psychological problems. And why don't we learn more about the perpetrators if the story is about some elaborate plot to drive away Ms. Giddens? If we don't learn such things, the elaborate conspiracy against Ms. Giddens doesn't really add much of anything to our understanding of her and her story; it just seems like a clever but empty plot twist.

I think the fact that Capote worked on the screenplay,makes it impossible not to view,"The Innocents" as a psychological thriller about a sexually frustrated governess who takes charge of two very disturbed little children who saw their,now dead, role models indulging in S&M activities.The Governess herself becomes obsessed with this idea and well....things go really really bad.

http://troyholden.blogspot.com/2010/07/box-office-poison.html