We live in an age where so much discourse surrounds the merits of viewing motion pictures in a theatrical setting versus streaming at home. Obviously supercharged by the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of "this movie has to be seen in a theater" becomes more of a question for people than it once was. However, streaming is not the first threat to theatrical exhibition, and it will not be the last. Hollywood's first major competitor for audience attention came after World War II when televisions were first making it into people's homes on a mass scale for the first time. At this point, we take TVs for granted, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the notion of watching filmed media inside your own home became a phenomenon. First came Cinerama, a process of using three separate projectors simultaneously to display one enormously wide image that would take up an audience's entire view, obviously something you cannot get on a 4:3 television at home. The documentary This Is Cinerama, which existed solely to demonstrate the technology of Cinerama, became the highest-grossing film of 1952, despite it having no story or famous faces and was only able to be shown in a very select number of equipped theaters.

The cost of converting theaters to be able to exhibit films shot in Cinerama probed to be enormously costly, causing the format to not be fully embraced by the industry, along with the annoying visible splits between the three projectors on the screen. To find their own alternative, 20th Century Fox looked across the Atlantic to French inventor Henri Chrétien who, in the 1920s, developed anamorphic lenses. These lenses had the ability to capture an image onto a normal frame of film that was twice as wide as the standard aspect ratio. When projected through an anamorphic lens, the image would be converted into its intended aspect ratio. Starting with the biblical epic The Robe in 1953, Fox dubbed their new format CinemaScope, using it across all their pictures in any genre and licensing out the trademark to all the other studios until 1967. Because of the new parameters of the frame, filmmakers had new opportunities with how to control the mise en scène of their works, notably to show off an increased scale. Director Jack Clayton and cinematographer Freddie Francis had other things in mind when they brought it to the screen in 1961 the horror classic The Innocents.

Adapted from the classic novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Innocents follows governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) beginning her new job in an English countryside manor caring for two orphaned children, Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin), put in the custody of their uncaring and not present uncle (Michael Redgrave). As Miss Giddens becomes ingratiated into these children's lives, she learns of the troubled past of the previous governess of the house, now dead, and her affair with the also deceased gardener. Miles has also been expelled from school for bad behavior, which Miss Giddens cannot truly see from how he acts in front of her. Naturally, she begins to see visions of the estate's previous caregivers and slowly unravels as to what she perceives as real or not.

The Innocents serves as a blueprint for countless haunted house pictures that followed not just in the film's structure but also for how Clayton and Francis utilize the extended CinemaScope frame to shroud so much in darkness. So many sequences of the film center Deborah Kerr in the frame and blast her face with the brightest lightest they possibly could use with the rest of the frame getting blacker the further away from her face. As Clayton and Francis became more comfortable with the image size, they would stage scenes utilizing extreme deep focus. Framing shots similar to how certain directors would later use split diopter lenses, one subject would be very close to the camera on one side and another subject very far away on the other, both in crisp focus. In these setups, the subject far away from the camera could be revealed through sudden bursts of light taking over a pitch-black section of the frame.

The ability to have so much of your image be completely dark in a modern horror landscape gives ample opportunity for jump scares--having things jump out of that darkness onto the brightly lit protagonist. Instead, The Innocents contains very little that would be considered a jump scare. Seeing Kerr wander through the darkness of the giant English home creates enough tension precisely because the horror of the film comes from her mental break of not knowing if she actually sees something that is real. Darkness breeds mystery and uncertainty. If you can see the horror in front of you, there is a chance you can confront it, but if all you see is black, you never can truly know where the horror is coming from. CinemaScope, for the most part, was used in conjunction with Technicolor film to give the audience the grandest experience possible, but The Innocents was filmed in stark black and white, only heightening the usage of darkness.

Of course, not every scene is completely black. Quite a lot of the film takes place in the daytime and outdoors. Clayton and Francis use CinemaScope to weaponize this as well by making the audience search frames for figures that seem unnatural. The proto-split diopter shots can place the possible ghost of the former governess Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop) far away from the camera in a field and makes you be the one to find her, rather than spotlighting her figure. The CinemaScope process tends to distort face shape, with the center of the frame being stretched and the edges compressed. These daylight scenes provide the best examples of these facial distortions, and even if they are barely noticeable, they still add to the eerie, slightly off nature of the picture.

One of the more surprising maximizations of the CinemaScope frame comes from how the film uses dissolves. Throughout The Innocents are a few sequences where shots are quickly superimposed upon one another. Two, three, or even four shots play out simultaneously on screen, and because the frame is so large, it can comfortably accomodate all these different images without feeling cluttered. These rapid cross-dissolves serve to amplify Miss Giddens' manic inner psyche, causing the audience's eyes to flutter back and forth across the screen for the hope of finding their own bearing through the madness. Naturally, the audience is unable to find that piece and feels just as on edge as the protagonist.

Initially, Clayton opposed shooting The Innocents in CinemaScope, hoping to shoot in the traditional academy ratio Hollywood was so desperate to escape due to its similarity to television. Being that 20th Century Fox had all the power and had put all their eggs in the CinemaScope basket, the film was not going to get made otherwise. Sometimes filmmakers being forced into a specific circumstance generates the greatest ingenuity, and the solutions Clayton and Francis, who had just won an Academy Award for using CinemaScope on the film Sons and Lovers from director Jack Cardiff (one of the greatest cinematographers in film history in his own right), arrived at revolutionized how to shoot horror films, especially haunted house ones. Whether it is Crimson Peak or The Woman in Black, no character stalking around an old manor with a candelabra in hand can escape the shadow of Deborah Kerr doing the same in The Innocents, and if Clayton had gotten his way and shot the film in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio, who knows how effective and influential the film would have become.