The Woman in Black

We seem to have established a tradition of showing a horror film around the time of Halloween.  In past years we've screen Let The Right One In and 30 Days of Night, and this year we're screening The Woman in Black.

 

My wife is a great fan of Susan Hill's writing and has seen the play (via school trips) more than a dozen times, so we decided to watch it at home.  We started the film quite late - inevitably - and were quite enjoying it.  Then just as we were getting to the scary part in Eel Marsh House there was a powercut.  Fortunately there was no rocking chair in a locked room upstairs and no visit from the Woman in Black herself.

 

Here are my notes:

 

The Woman in Black

UK 2011                      94 minutes

Director:                      James Watkins

Starring:                        Daniel Radcliffe, Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer, Roger Allam, Shaun Dooley, Sophie Stuckey

 “Her face, in its extreme pallor, her eyes, sunken but unnaturally bright, were burning with the concentration of passionate emotion which was within her and which streamed from her.  Whether or not this hatred and malevolence was directed towards me I had no means of telling – I had no reason at all to suppose that it could possibly have been, but at that moment I was far from able to base my reactions upon reason and logic.  For the combination of the peculiar, isolated place and the sudden appearance of the woman and the dreadfulness of her expression began to fill me with fear.”

Susan Hill: The Woman in Black

 Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe), a young solicitor, visits the remote coastal village of Crythin Gifford to obtain the paperwork to sell the remote, bleak and desolate Eel March House after the death of Mrs Drablow, an elderly client of his firm.  While staying at the house, Kipps sees the mysterious figure of a woman dressed in black and from letters he discovers he finds out who she is.  From the locals he learns that the appearance of the Woman in Black always leads to the death of a child.

 The film is based on the classic novel by Susan Hill which was previously filmed in 1989 with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale (of Quatermass fame), which has also been dramatised for the stage and has been running in London for more than 20 years.  The novel consciously echoes the style of the great ghost stories of M R James (one of the chapters has the title “Whistle and I’ll Come to You”), but the skillful adaptation by Jane Goodman, while retaining the key elements of Hill’s novel and remaining true to its spirit, reorders and compresses them to make them more immediate – and more chilling.

 The film received much publicity through the astute casting of Daniel Radcliffe in his first post-Potter role, with his performance as the young solicitor receiving generally good reviews.  It is also worth noting that the film is the most successful production to date of the relaunched Hammer Film Productions, the company dominated the horror film market from the mid-1950s to the 1970s with innumerable cycles of films featuring Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy. 

The Woman in Black has been the most successful Hammer film ever in the USA as well as the highest grossing UK horror film for 20 years. Hammer Films has subsequently announced that there will be a sequel to the film, currently called The Woman in Black: Angels of Death.  Susan Hill will provide an original story set during the Second World War: Eel Marsh House has been converted to a military mental hospital and the arrival of disturbed soldiers re-awakes its darkest inhabitant.

 

Here's the trailer: