Benjamin Britten the apex of his reputation: it was almost universally hailed as a masterpiece." Shostakovich told Rostropovich that he believed it to be "the greatest work of the twentieth century". In 1967 the BBC commissioned Britten to write an opera specially for television. "Owen Wingrave" was based, like "The Turn of the Screw", on a ghost story by Henry James. By the 1960s Britten found composition much slower than in his prolific youth; he told the 28-year-old composer Nicholas Maw, "Get as much done now as you can, because it gets much, much more difficult as you grow older." He did
The Turn of the Screw (2009 film) film is a thriller, she argues, is further expressed through the use of a collage of images before the opening scene. However, the use of horrific imagery (including an open grave) in the collage "highlight[s] the contradiction inherent in this rendering of the novella": while the story is presented as psychological, the viewer is nonetheless drawn into the film as a horror story. Other than the atypical frame narrative, Sborgi considers the adaptation fairly conventional with regard to both setting and costume. For the literary theorist Thomas S. Hischak, "The Turn of the Screw" is a weak adaptation of the