The Woman in Black

Year 12, Day 288 - 10/14/20 - Movie #3,674

BEFORE: Ah, nothing like a good old-fashioned ghost story - why not, it's a welcome change from werewolves and vampires at this point.  This reminds me that I forgot to check in with Turner Classic Movies, to see what they're up to in October.  Let me see - well, they're kind of all over the classic horror map, every Friday there's a different theme, like "Back from the Grave" or "Deals with the Devil".  I've already missed the first two weeks of their programming, there's not much there that I'm interested in, but hey, if you haven't seen "Creature from the Black Lagoon" or "The Thing from Another World", check those out on October 23, this week on October 16 it's "Horror Anthologies", like "Dead of Night" and "Twice-Told Tales".  Eh, I'll take a pass - I still have like 10 classic mummy movies to watch that they ran two or three years ago, before I had my successful perfect year in 2019, and now there's no way to link to them, so I have to wait until my chain gets broken.  But they've also made Peter Cushing their Star of the Month for October, so tune in on Monday, October 19 for some of those Dracula and Frankenstein movies he made for Hammer Films.  

That's a great segue to tonight's film, which is also from Hammer Studios, the modern incarnation of it, anyway, let's hope their production values have improved since the mid-1960's.  There was a previous version of this story made for the BBC back in 1989, and it's based on a novel by Susan Hill (no relation to Joe Hill, who's really Joe King).  

Daniel Radcliffe carries over from "Horns", and I guess after so much time spent as Harry Potter, being in movies about the supernatural became sort of his thing, right?  I already watched that "Victor Frankenstein" movie he was in, and this year I found three more horror/dark fantasy films that he made after graduating from Hogwarts...

THE PLOT: A young solicitor travels to a remote village where he discovers the vengeful ghost of a scorned woman is terrorizing the locals. 

AFTER: Maybe this ghost story / haunted house film is just a bit TOO old-fashioned.  The storyline seems fairly standard, an innocent person is sent to a house on business and really, the story just kind of HAS to be set back in the early 1900's, because back in those days, the people had to go to where the documents were, they didn't have FedEx or UPS or even fax machine technology, and that means they CERTAINLY couldn't scan all the documents into PDF files and upload them to an FTP site.  It's almost comical here because Radcliffe's lawyer character, Arthur Kripps, is clearly on the outs with his boss - he must have screwed the pooch on a couple of previous estate cases, because the head solicitor says, "You must go to this house and view EVERY piece of paper yourself, no matter how long that takes!"  

Then, when he arrives in the village of Crythin Gifford, nobody wants to talk to him because he's an outsider, everyone sort of looks away, the hotel conveniently "loses" his reservation, and then the keeper of the house he's supposed to visit (Eel Marsh House) brings him a small folder of documents and says, "Here you go, here's all the relevant paperwork, too bad you can't stay, enjoy your train ride back to London!"  But this contradicts the very specific instructions he got to GO to Eel Marsh Manor, which is the movie's way of making him go to the haunted house and spend a few days there, at least.

If only there were an easy solution, like, I don't know, maybe pack up all the papers into a box or two and GTFO?  Maybe read the important documents back at the hotel or something, instead of the haunted house?  Just sayin'

In the process of going through the accounting files - remember, his boss EXPLICITLY said he had to look at every piece of paper in the house - he learns about the death of a 7-year old boy, and also that the boy was adopted by the rich couple, and was apparently the son of the wife's sister.  He drowned in the marsh - oh yeah, the manor is inconveniently located on an island, at the end of a causeway, so twice a day during high tide, it's impossible get to (or away from) the house.  How conveniently inconvenient. And in that correspondence (remember, EVERY piece of paper...) he learns the boy's real mother accused the couple of not doing enough to rescue her son from the carriage accident in the marsh, put a curse on the couple, and then hung herself in the nursery.  This is the sort of thing that practically guarantees she'll come back as a ghost to haunt the house, looking for her lost son's spirit, and also luring all the neighborhood children to commit suicide. 

A lot of this years films so far have been about control, or the lack thereof.  We're all afraid of losing control, or being controlled, or having no control.  The teens in "The Cabin in the Woods" didn't know that they were being watched, that someone was controlling the events around them.  The werewolves in "Twilight" were controlled by their animal instincts, and of course humans are powerless against sparkly vampires and their moody hypnotic powers.  Maleficent was always keeping her emotions in check, for fear of letting her evil get out of control, and in "Horns" Ig Parrish found that he could suggest actions to people, and they would just obey his commands.  Tonight it's the Woman in Black who is able to control the actions of children in her village, she can tell them to walk into the ocean until they drown, or set fire to the room that they're in and not leave, or drink whatever household poison is handy.  

Arthur can't seem to concentrate on his estate paperwork, and instead chooses to explore the whole house - bad mistake.  He could have been done in just a few hours, maybe, if he hadn't gone exploring - then he might also not have seen the Woman in Black from an upstairs window, and then, of course, it's too late.  Now she's got to kill even MORE local villager children, just to spite him, or something.  But Arthur's got a bright (terrible) idea, to locate her son's body in the sunken carriage on the marshes, lay him out in one of the bedrooms so her spirit can see it, and then lay it to rest in the family tomb, next to his mother's body.  What's the opposite of grave-robbing?  I guess it's this.  

He's got to hurry, though, because his own son is due to arrive from London the next day, and again, this is set way back, before you could just call somebody and tell them to not get on the train that they have tickets for.  If his son arrives and the Woman in Black is still in a killing mood, obviously she's going to go straight for Arthur's son to prove her point.  (Arthur's wife, of course, died years ago in childbirth, so his son is all that he has, and it kills him to have to keep going on assignments to haunted houses to pay the bills, because he's missing out on his son's childhood.)

It's all just a bit boring, though, which is not really what you want to hear about a haunted house movie. The Woman in Black's got nothing on Pennywise, that's for sure.  There are plenty of creepy Victorian dolls in every room of Eel Marsh House, but that only gets you so far in the end.  Why does everybody in town blame Arthur for the deaths of their children, when most of the time he wasn't even THERE, plus he's the only person trying to actively STOP that process?  For that matter, if there's a ghost in town that's killing kids, why not move?  Again, just sayin'.

What you really see on display, here, though is the early 20th century predominating belief that there's an afterlife, whether it's people believing in heaven and hell, or ghosts tormenting villages because of unresolved issues from their lives.  Those things kind of go hand in hand, right?  Opposite sides of the same belief system?  I'd like to think that humanity is more educated and science-based now, and we can all stop believing in both ghosts AND heaven, but stupidity just seems to keep lingering on, doesn't it?  Think about it - if the afterlife is SO great, why don't we all just kill ourselves to get there?  Oh, right, you can't get in if you commit suicide.  Still, why is everybody trying to stick around longer, then, if their loved ones are waiting for them on the other side?  And if you didn't believe in heaven, how would you act differently, would you take better care of yourself, watch what you eat more closely and not indulge in risky behavior?  It's something to think about - I'm all for sticking around this world as long as I can, but I'd still rather not change my behaviors.  It happens when it happens, I guess. 

Also starring Ciaran Hinds (last heard in "Frozen II"), Janet McTeer (last seen in "Fathers and Daughters"), Liz White, Roger Allam (last seen in "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"), Tim McMullan (last seen in "The Queen"), Jessica Raine (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2010)), Daniel Cerqueira, Shaun Dooley (last seen in "The Borrowers" (2011)), Mary Stockley, David Burke (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Sophie Stuckey (last seen in "My Life in Ruins"), Misha Handley, Aoife Doherty, Victor McGuire, Alexia Osborne (last seen in "Dark Shadows"), Alfie Field, William Tobin, Alisa Khazanova, Ashley Foster, Sidney Johnston, Cathy Sara, Emma Shorey, Molly Harmon, Elisa Walker-Reid

RATING: 5 out of 10 birthday cards