Some might say that if you’ve seen one haunted house story you’ve seen them all. There’s not really many different directions we’ve seen these movies go. Generally a person gets locked in a spooky house, they start to see shadows out of the corner of their eyes and hear mysterious thumps in the distance, and eventually the disturbances get so intense that they develop an air of danger, even likely causing someone physical harm. Then, when the danger reaches a fever pitch, we get the big finale, which is generally a full body apparition of a ghost doing something crazy. Does it have to be that way though? Isn’t there plenty of room for somebody to make a different interpretation of what a spirit haunting a house would be like? If there is, The Woman in Black isn’t the movie that’s going to show it to us. In crafting and conception this is a traditional ghost story in every sense of the word. And while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s also not very memorable.
Daniel Radcliffe is our star here, and he’s playing a down on his luck lawyer tasked with the job of traveling to an abandoned old house that is going up for sale soon, going through all of the legal documents that are stored there, and doing something lawyery with them. This task isn’t as easy as it sounds, because the townsfolk are pretty adamant about not letting anybody get to the remote estate, and if you’re somehow able to find a ride out to the house, you then have to deal with all of the ghosts that live there; including the woman in black, who has a penchant for causing the death of children. Given such impossible odds, a lot of people might just quit, but Radcliffe’s character has bills to pay, a son to support, and this is his last chance at making good on a duty and not losing his job. The stakes are huge.
As far as the acting here goes, all of the spotlight is pointed directly at Radcliffe’s face. Much of the film’s runtime is him alone with the things that go bump in the night, so the task of keeping us engaged is largely on his shoulders. He does a pretty good job. I guess after eight Harry Potter movies he has quite a bit of experience stumbling around in the dark and looking scared, so he was probably the most qualified person to take this job. And as far as him making the transition from being Harry Potter to doing other roles, this was probably a safe way for him to do something similar but show a little diversity at the same time. Still, qualifications and newly grown sideburns and beard stubble aside, I’m still not convinced that Radcliffe is appropriately cast. I’m not ready to accept him playing the role of a lawyer, especially one who is raising a child. This kid is barely old enough to be done with his undergraduate work, and he looks it. Probably he would have been better off choosing something more young adult and less adult adult for his first post-Potter starring role.
You can put all of that aside though, because where a haunted house movie lives and dies is in its scares, and The Woman in Black’s greatest strength is its spookiness. Director James Watkins and his crew do a masterful job setting the mood. The sets are elaborate and lived in, and that goes a long way toward making a ghost story legitimately scary. You have to feel the history in everything you’re looking at, imagine the untold horrors that might have taken place there over the years. This film’s Eel Marsh House is the best scary building I’ve seen in a movie in a while, and that’s because it includes all three of my important pillars of creating a horror movie; shadows, cobwebs, and fog. Scaring an audience is all about establishing an atmosphere of dread, an environment that invites doom. You have to convince an audience to let you scare them, and renting a fog machine, turning down the lights, and stringing up some fake webbing goes a long way toward accomplishing that. Too many modern movies try to scare me in a set that looks like the guy who lives across the street from me’s house. That’s not an environment where I’m ready to be scared, it’s an environment where I’m ready to watch the big game.
This movie takes advantage of the infamous “jump scare” as well. You know, those moments in a horror movie where there is sudden movement out of nowhere, usually a cat jumping on a table or something, that are designed to get a cheap rise out of the more nervous members of the audience. The secret to these is first engrossing people in your story, convincing them that danger lurks everywhere, and then not telegraphing when you’re going to go for a scare. You want to get them when their guard is down. The Woman in Black cheats a bit by cranking up the volume of whatever is causing our scare to ear splitting levels. That’s a pretty common trick, but it feels a little cheap here because all of the scares are just so much louder than everything else going on. Sudden noises like this could get somebody to jump in the middle of an Adam Sandler movie, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve earned the reaction.
Still, plenty of the scares here are earned. With as much time as you spend alongside Radcliffe going room to room in this mansion, chasing after specters, you’d think that you would get bored after a while. But this one manages to always ramp up the danger and creepiness so that the horror elements build upon one another and eventually reach a crescendo. If only there was anything in this movie that struck me as new, anything that didn’t feel like well-worn material, this could have actually been a really strong horror film. Unfortunately, from the townsfolk ducking behind doors when Radcliffe arrives in town, to the over reliance on little children acting creepy, to the storyline where the ghost is sticking around because it has “unfinished business” (business that I guess it plans on finishing by making a bunch of thumping noises whenever someone is around), this movie offers nothing but haunted house clichés that you’ve already seen a million times before. It’s not a bad time while you’re actually watching it, but it’s not something that’s going to stick with you after you leave the theater. Sleep soundly.
Seriously though, what’s the deal with all of these little children in horror movies? They’re like the new go-to. Weird little kids can be scary every once in a while, but you know what’s really scary? Weird grown adults!
