The Nightcomers is a 1971 British horror film directed by Michael Winner and starring Marlon Brando, Stephanie Beacham, Thora Hird, Harry Andrews and Anna Palk.

Recently orphaned, Flora and Miles are abandoned by their new guardian and entrusted to the care of housekeeper Mrs. Grose, governess Miss Jessel, and Peter Quint, the former valet and now gardener.

The children begin spying on Quint and Jessel's violent trysts and mimic what they see, including the bondage, culminating in Miles nearly pushing Flora off a building to her death.

"[citation needed] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "The Nightcomers attempts to reconstruct the fictional events that lead up to the beginning of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and form a macabre unwritten background to the tale.

Though the contrast between Mrs. Grose's snobbish gentility and the increasing permissiveness of her household provide several nice comic moments, Hastings' pseudo-Jamesian dialogue goes through some very sticky patches ("You look at me as if it were a misdemeanour of some proportion") and Marlon Brando's Quint alternates eccentrically between brooding Method silences and stage-Irish buffoonery.

The death-blow is finally dealt by Michael Winner's direction, with its over-insistent use of the zoom, its unerring eye for the wrong camera set-up and its chronic inability to build suspense through whole sequences.

[12] Leonard Maltin blamed Winner's "poor direction" for hurting the film's attempt to chronicle the original story's preceding events.