The Turn of the Screw (opera) composer conducting. Described as one of the most dramatically appealing English operas, the opera in two acts has a prologue and sixteen scenes, each preceded by a variation on the twelve-note 'Screw' theme. Typically of Britten, the music mixes tonality and dissonance, with Britten's recurrent use of a twelve-tone figure being perhaps a nod to the approach of Arnold Schoenberg. Thematically, the play gives a central role to a line borrowed from W. B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming": "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." The opera was given its British premiere on 6 October 1954 by the Sadler's Wells
The Turn of the Screw (2009 film) America. The BBC had previously adapted several horror stories as Christmas films, with their series "A Ghost Story for Christmas" including adaptations of the M. R. James stories "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" (filmed as "The Stalls of Barchester"), "A Warning to the Curious", "Lost Hearts", "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" and "The Ash Tree". "The Turn of the Screw" fits into this "mini-genre" of the Christmas horror film. The BBC executive and drama commissioner Ben Stephenson, discussing "The Turn of the Screw", said that "Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a ghost story for the adults to watch in front